Work with me

Researched and written 2026-09-29 14:15 SGT · 16 sources listed at the end · draft 1 · figures verified against the named sources on the date shown; where a source has since moved, the element carries a marker.

stan.sg answers one property question at a time, cited to a government source, dated, and free. Every other door on this site is built for someone with a situation — a buyer, a landlord, an executor. This page is not that. It exists because a reader on almost every one of those pages eventually hits a wall a citation cannot get them past: a figure correctly stated is not a transaction completed, and the step after the figure needs a person who holds a licence the reader does not. This page is the one door for that person — the property agent, the mortgage broker, the conveyancing lawyer, the renovation contractor, the private lender, the corporate services provider, the trust professional — asking whether they can be that person for this site's readers. It is one page on purpose: professionals are not sorted into situations, they are sorted into registrations, and a registration either qualifies you or it does not.

The mechanics

Every fact-driven page on this site ends at the same wall. An ABSD rate, an LTV ceiling, a Seller's Stamp Duty schedule — these are correct, dated, and cited to IRAS or MAS, and none of them execute a transaction. Reading a fact and acting on it are different acts, and the second one is where a licence a reader does not hold becomes load-bearing. This site's job stops at the fact. A professional's job starts there.

The mechanic stays simple on purpose. A reader who needs a licensed hand is told, by role, who does that work and on what registration, stated up front rather than implied by a badge or a testimonial. Nothing on this page is a lead-generation form. It is a description of who qualifies, what the site expects of the working relationship, and what a professional actually earns doing it — including where that earning structure cuts against the client's interest, because a page that hides that would be lying to the same reader it spent the rest of the site telling the truth to.

Eligibility — which registration puts you on this page

Every spoke on this page maps to a real licence or registration, not a fee paid to this site. None of them are interchangeable, and holding one does not qualify you for another. Six roles are described below; if you do not hold one of these, this page is not for you yet, and the honest answer is to go get the registration, not to ask this site to look past its absence.

• Property agent or salesperson — CEA registration through exactly one licensed estate agency at a time
• Mortgage or home-loan broker — no personal MAS licence to broker a bank home loan, paid a referral commission by the bank
• Renovation, A&A or rebuild contractor — a BCA builder's licence, and for HDB work a place in HDB's own Directory of Renovation Contractors
• Conveyancing lawyer — admitted to the Singapore Bar, acting through a licensed law practice
• Private-credit or bridging lender — a Ministry of Law moneylender's licence, or a documented exemption
• Corporate services or trust professional — acting for a company, VCC or trust structure a client uses to hold property

A property agent registers with CEA through exactly one licensed estate agency at a time and cannot hold a second registration with another agency in parallel. Entry needs at least four GCE O-Level passes or the WPLN equivalent, a pass on both papers of the Real Estate Salesperson course and exam, professional indemnity insurance, current CPF MediSave contributions, and a minimum age of 21; an agency's own Key Executive Officer needs at least three years of estate agency experience and 30 concluded transactions in the last three years on top of that. Registration runs on a three-year cycle, the renewal exercise for 2026 running 1 October to 30 November at a S$280 registration fee plus a S$60 application fee — half-refunded for anyone who already paid it once in 2025.

An estate agency itself pays an application fee of S$120 and an annual licence fee that runs from S$330 to over S$40,000 depending on how many salespersons it carries, and must hold professional indemnity insurance covering the entity and every salesperson under it, at a minimum limit of S$100,000 to S$1 million by firm size. A CEA-registered agent is separately barred, by a joint MAS-CEA ruling, from acting as a financial adviser's representative at the same time — the regulator does not want an agent incentivised to steer a client toward a higher-commission property purchase over a financial product that actually fits, and any yield or price-appreciation claim an agent makes must be backed by verifiable comparable-transaction data, not a feeling about the market.

A mortgage broker carries no personal MAS licence to broker a bank home loan; the broker is paid a referral commission by the bank on disbursal, not by the borrower, disclosed under MAS rules rather than assumed. A renovation or A&A contractor needs a BCA Class 1 licence for work of any value or Class 2 for projects up to S$6 million wherever the work needs Commissioner of Building Control plan approval, and for HDB-flat work specifically, only a contractor already listed in HDB's own Directory of Renovation Contractors may be engaged at all — a client-facing rule with no exceptions, and a contractor working outside it is not doing legal work regardless of quality.

A company set up to hold or structure a purchase still needs at least one Singapore-resident director — a Citizen, PR, or an Employment Pass, Personalised Employment Pass or ONE Pass holder who otherwise qualifies — alongside a qualified company secretary; incorporating a shell does not remove that requirement, and a corporate-services professional working this page's B2B spoke is the person who actually satisfies it for a client who has none of those passes. A private-credit or bridging lender referred through this page's estate and commercial spokes is capped by law at 4% a month interest, a 10% administrative fee and total charges no more than the loan principal, and must hold a Ministry of Law moneylender's licence, or a documented exemption, before a mandate is given at all.

Citizenship status — what changes because of who your client is

Singapore Citizen, Permanent Resident, foreigner, or an entity or trust — the same purchase carries a different Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty rate depending only on which of those the buyer is, before a single dollar of price or financing is discussed. A Citizen pays 20% ABSD on a second residential property and 30% on a third; a PR pays 5% on a first, 30% on a second, 35% on a third; a foreigner pays 60% on any residential property regardless of count; an entity or trust pays 65%. Quoting a client the wrong tier because you assumed their status instead of asking is the single most common way a professional on this page costs a client six figures before a contract is even signed.

Five nationalities sit outside that ladder entirely: a US, Swiss, Liechtenstein, Norwegian or Icelandic national, and an EFTA Permanent Resident, is taxed at the Singapore Citizen rate under Singapore's free trade agreements — and a Singapore PR who is also a US citizen is likewise charged at the Citizen rate rather than the PR rate, under the same US-Singapore FTA. This is not automatic: it runs through a remission application on the IRAS myTax Portal, not a checkbox at completion, and a professional who does not know it exists will let a US-national client overpay ABSD by tens of thousands of dollars with no error on IRAS's part.

FTA parity is a stamp-duty rule only. It says nothing about the Residential Property Act: an FTA national buying a landed house or vacant residential land still needs Land Dealings Approval Unit approval, on the same PR-of-five-years-plus-exceptional-contribution test as any other foreigner. A condominium unit or a strata-landed unit in an approved condominium needs no such approval regardless of ABSD treatment, because that gate is set by a different statute answering a different question — and a professional who conflates the two tells a client a landed house is available to them when it is not.

Taxes — what you must get right before you quote a number

Buyer's Stamp Duty is progressive and applies to every purchase regardless of citizenship: 1% on the first S$180,000, 2% on the next S$180,000, 3% on the next S$640,000, 4% on the next S$500,000, 5% on the next S$1,500,000, and 6% above S$3,000,000 — on a S$4,000,000 purchase that works out to S$179,600 before ABSD is added on top. Seller's Stamp Duty runs a four-year holding period on residential property, since 4 July 2025: 16% in year one, 12% in year two, 8% in year three, 4% in year four, nil after. Quoting a client the old three-year, lower-rate schedule that predates the reform is not a rounding error — it changes whether a sale clears SSD at all.

Property tax at owner-occupier rates is granted to exactly one property a person owns and occupies; every other residential property they hold, whether a further home they live in or one they let out, is taxed at the higher non-owner-occupier bands. A demolished or vacant residential plot is assessed at 5% of its estimated freehold value and taxed at the flat 10% non-residential rate, with no relief for the land simply sitting empty — a fact that matters directly to this page's rebuild spoke, where a client between an old house coming down and a new one going up is still paying property tax the whole time.

Your own commission income carries its own IRAS treatment, separate from anything above: a commission agent with gross annual commission of S$50,000 or less can claim a fixed 25% expense deduction ratio in place of itemising actual expenses, which is simpler but not automatically larger — run both ways before you file, because whichever route understates your real deductible expenses costs you money the client's transaction never touched.

Borrowing — LTV, TDSR, MSR, and the boundary you don't cross

MAS's loan-to-value ladder is the first number in any financing conversation: 75% on a first housing loan, dropping to 45% on a second outstanding loan, 35% on a third, and as low as 15% for a company or a borrower with a long remaining loan tenure. HDB's own limit was cut from 80% to 75% for resale applications from 20 August 2024, aligning it with the bank-loan limit for the first time — a professional still quoting 80% on an HDB loan is quoting a rule that has not existed since 2024.

Total Debt Servicing Ratio caps every property loan at 55% of gross monthly income, stress-tested at a 4% floor rate for residential property regardless of the rate actually quoted, so a client's real monthly payment and the payment the bank assesses them against are two different numbers. Mortgage Servicing Ratio applies only to an HDB flat or an EC still within its minimum occupation period, capped separately at 30% of gross income. A professional working the financing side is paid the way a mortgage broker is actually paid — a disclosed referral commission from the bank on disbursal — not by steering a client toward whichever package pays the largest one.

Reno, A&A and rebuild — control, on this page's terms

CPF savings cannot fund renovation, addition-and-alteration or rebuild work, with no exceptions listed by CPF Board. Every renovation professional on this page's client list is being paid in cash or bank-loan proceeds, never CPF — a professional who tells a client otherwise is describing a product that does not exist.

For an HDB flat, only a contractor already listed in HDB's own Directory of Renovation Contractors may be engaged at all, under the Housing and Development (Renovation Control) Rules, and all demolition or wall-hacking, partial or complete, needs HDB's prior written approval carried out only by certified workers. A BCA builder needs a Class 1 licence for work of any value, or Class 2 for projects up to S$6 million, wherever plan approval from the Commissioner of Building Control is needed — the licence class is the boundary between a contractor this page can put a client in front of and one it cannot.

IRAS treats renovation and refurbishment as capital expenditure by default, not automatically deductible against income; the Section 14N deduction for renovation capex exists only for a business using the property in its own trade, and a passive landlord letting the unit out does not qualify. A renovation professional advising a landlord client on the tax angle of a fit-out, rather than just the construction of it, is giving tax advice they may not be licensed to give — know where your own boundary sits before a client asks you to cross it.

Conveyancing — no fixed fee, and that cuts both ways

There is no government-set fee schedule for private conveyancing in Singapore; lawyers price purchase and mortgage-side work on their own terms, commonly S$2,000 to S$5,000 all-in for a private purchase and closer to S$1,500 to S$3,000 for an HDB resale with a private lawyer. That cuts both ways: a lawyer on this page is free to price competitively, and a client is entitled to ask for a quote broken down by transfer, mortgage, registration and searches rather than accept one headline total, since a headline total is comparable only when it covers the same scope of work.

CPF Ordinary Account savings can pay stamp duty and legal fees; they cannot pay monthly service charges, conservancy charges, property tax, or anything related to the property's ongoing use. A client who assumes CPF covers the legal bill in full is often short by exactly the amount that never qualified, and finding that out at completion rather than at engagement is the kind of surprise a conveyancing professional on this page exists to prevent.

Estate — the professional executor, and the family who did not choose you

A professional firm or a trust corporation may serve as executor, and often should where a will names an executor living overseas, since an overseas executor faces real practical difficulty administering a Singapore estate from abroad. A court may award an executor a commission of up to 5% of the value of assets collected — the professional-executor economics on this page, stated the same way the realtor economics are stated below: it is disclosed, it is capped, and it is earned only once the estate is actually collected, not on appointment.

A Grant of Probate is available only where the deceased left a valid will naming the applicant as executor; with no valid will, the route is Letters of Administration instead, and an estate under S$50,000 may be administered by the Public Trustee's Office without a grant at all. A professional taking on an executorship needs to know which gate applies before quoting a timeline, because the two routes do not run on the same clock. [⚠ estate.probate.eligibility_2026_06_15: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

Where the client is not settling a death but managing someone who has lost mental capacity without ever signing a Lasting Power of Attorney, the route is deputyship, not probate: a simplified track runs four to six weeks at a S$40 to S$50 filing fee for orders up to a defined limit, against three to four months and S$300 to S$500 on the standard track where the case is contested or exceeds that scope. A professional who defaults every incapacity case to the standard track is charging a client for months of process the simplified track would have closed in weeks. [⚠ deputyship.tracks_2026_09: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

The twelve questions — the language this site expects you to use

This is not a sales script. It is the frame every fact-driven page on this site is built on, and it is the language stan.sg expects the professional on the other side of a referral to use with a client — in plain words, never in beta, Sharpe ratio or IRR, because a client who cannot follow the language cannot make the decision the language is meant to help with.

Two questions do the sorting, and neither is whether the client is buying to invest or to live in it — nobody buys believing the price will fall, so that question sorts nobody. The two that matter: are they borrowing to buy, and once they hold it, are they letting it out? Cash plus own-use is pure appreciation with no carry. Cash plus let-out is yield, positive carry by construction. Borrow plus own-use is negative carry by construction — most owner-occupiers sit here, and few of them say it out loud. Borrow plus let-out is the spread play, and the gap between the rent and the financing cost is the whole game.

• C0 The play — is this a balance-sheet play or a cash-flow play for the client?
• C1 Balance sheet — what does this do to what the client owns and what they owe?
• C2 Cash flow — what actually moves in and out, and when, and where is the funding gap?
• C3 P&L — what does it do to profit, which is not the same question as C2
• C4 Carry — income minus financing cost: positive, negative, or none
• C5 Give / get — the trade, stated plainly: what you give, and what you get
• C6 Exposed to — what can move against the client, and against you
• C7 For how long — the horizon the client is actually committing to
• C8 Failure cascade — negative carry hits cash flow, accumulates into P&L, then negative equity, then illiquidity, then insolvency
• C9 Liquidity — how fast does this become money again, and at what haircut
• C10 Control — can the client move the outcome, or are they a price-taker
• C11 The exit — how do they get out, and what does getting out cost

C1, C2 and C3 are three separate things, and a professional who merges them into one answer does the client the specific harm this frame exists to prevent: the people who cannot tell the income statement from the cash flow are the ones who hit a liquidity squeeze they did not see coming. A client can be profitable on paper — rent above mortgage interest, on C3 — while the cash in their account this month does not cover this month's instalment, because a lump repair or a vacant month sits in C2 and never touches C3 at all. Keeping the three separate, out loud, with the client, is the single most useful thing a professional on this page does that a listing photo does not.

The same frame applies to your own practice, and it is worth running once. A commission-based practice is a pure cash-flow play — C0 — with nothing on C1's balance sheet: no property, no equity, no asset that appreciates while you sleep, unless you separately build one. There is no carry on C4, because there is no financed holding to carry; there is only pipeline, and pipeline is lumpy. What is exposed on C6 is not a market price — it is your registration, your reputation with the agencies and lenders you refer to, and the deal flow itself. C9 liquidity for you is the gap between doing the work and being paid for it — a resale commission is paid on completion, ten to twelve weeks after the work starts, not on the day you earn it. C11, the exit, for an individual professional is mostly just stopping; for a firm, it is whatever equity the firm itself built, which is a different, separate question this page does not answer.

The firm, not just the person

An individual professional works with me on the terms above. A firm — a law practice, a bank's mortgage desk, an estate agency, a renovation contractor, a trust or corporate-services company — works on the same terms at a larger scale: no fee to this site, no ranking by what is paid, a referral that goes where the client's situation actually points rather than where a mandate sits. If your firm wants to be kept in mind when a client's situation matches what it does, that is the whole ask, stated plainly, with nothing attached to it.

For a firm working the fund and family-office side of this site, a Variable Capital Company structure has been available in Singapore since 14 January 2020 and complements the country's other fund vehicles; it must appoint a MAS-regulated fund manager and, if run as an umbrella, must keep each sub-fund's assets, liabilities and accounts segregated and separately filed. A firm specialising in industrial or commercial property is working a different tax shape entirely: Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty does not reach industrial property for any buyer at all, which removes most of the citizenship machinery that dominates a residential referral and replaces it with a Seller's Stamp Duty question on its own three-year clock instead of the residential four-year one.

A private-credit or bridging firm referred through this page's estate and commercial spokes is expected to hold, or be exempt from, a Ministry of Law moneylender's licence before any mandate is given, capped by the same 4%-a-month interest and 10% administrative-fee ceilings that apply to any licensed moneylender, with total charges never exceeding the loan principal. A firm that will not state its licence status in writing before a mandate does not get referred through this page, and a firm that wants nothing for a first conversation before a mandate exists is exactly the posture this page is built to reward.

The realtor economics — what the agent earns, and where the incentive points

Commission is not fixed and not government-set, for any property type; it is agreed between agent and client, and it is genuinely negotiable — almost 8 in 10 consumers already know this, and 85% of those who negotiated succeeded in lowering the rate. An exclusive agreement runs up to three months and the client stays liable for commission on a sale inside that window even through another agent, extending three months past the agreement's end for anyone introduced during it.

On a resale, the seller typically pays around 2%, with the buyer's agent paid by co-broke out of that or by the buyer directly where agreed. On a new launch, the developer pays the buyer's agent instead — the buyer pays nothing directly, which is exactly the structure that makes a new-launch push worth asking harder questions about, since the agent's fee comes from the seller of the newest, least-track -record stock on the market, not from the client sitting across the table.

An agent cannot represent and collect commission from both parties in the same transaction — doing so is an offence, not a breach of etiquette. A separate industry best-practice guide, in force since 1 July 2024 and adopted by agencies representing about 90% of salespersons as of February 2025, pushes co-broking further: each agent collects only from the client they actually represent, closing off the softer version of the same conflict that the outright ban already covers.

Reported market income for an agent runs a wide range: a median of around S$72,000 a year, against S$10,000 to S$40,000 in a new agent's first year — a spread wide enough to explain, without excusing, why a struggling agent pushes volume over disclosure. On a rental, the norm is about one month's rent from the landlord for a 12-month lease, split roughly in half between landlord's and tenant's agents on an HDB whole-flat rental with an agent on each side.

Working with me does not pay better than working any other way for an agent who steers a client toward whichever listing, product or structure pays the largest commission. It pays exactly the same, disclosed, whether the referral closes on a S$500,000 resale flat or a S$15,000,000 GCB, because the fee structure this page runs on is not the fee structure the agent earns from the client — the two are independent, and stated that way on purpose, including where it cuts against my own incentive to send volume to whoever is easiest to work with rather than whoever is right for the client in front of them.

Get in touch

If you hold the registration this page names, and you are willing to work on these terms — disclosed, written, unranked by what you pay — say so. There is no form to rank higher on, no tier to buy into, and no volume of past referrals that substitutes for the licence itself.

Sources

• CEA — Information for aspiring real estate salespersons (2026-03-03) · https://www.cea.gov.sg/real-estate-professionals/for-aspiring-real-estate-salespersons/information-for-aspiring-real-estate-salespersons/
• CEA — Key Things to Know about the SEAA Best Practice Guide for Co-broking Commission (2024-07-01) · https://www.cea.gov.sg/about-cea/newsroom-publications/ceanergy-blog/key-things-to-know-about-the-seaa-best-practice-guide-for-co-broking-commission/
• MAS — Loan-to-Value limits, Notice 632 (2018-07-06) · https://www.mas.gov.sg/regulation/notices/notice-632
• MAS — Joint response to letter on regulating property agents under the FAA (2025-12-16) · https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/letters-to-editor/2025/joint-response-to-regulating-property-agents-under-faa
• IRAS — Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty (ABSD) (2023-04-27) · https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/stamp-duty/for-property/buying-or-acquiring-property/additional-buyer's-stamp-duty-(absd)
• IRAS — Seller's Stamp Duty (SSD) for residential property (2025-07-04) · https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/stamp-duty/for-property/selling-or-disposing-property/seller's-stamp-duty-(ssd)-for-residential-property
• IRAS — FAQ on the 25% Fixed Expense Deduction Ratio for commission agents (2026-09-28) · https://www.iras.gov.sg/media/docs/default-source/uploadedfiles/pdf/faq---25-fixed-expense-deduction-ratio-for-commission-agents.pdf
• HDB — Important Information on Renovations (2026-09-28) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg/managing-my-home/renovation-and-maintenance/renovation/important-information-on-renovations
• HDB — Measures to Cool the HDB Resale Market and Provide More Support for First-Time Home Buyers (2024-08-20) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/news-and-publications/press-releases/19082024-Measures-to-Cool-the-HDB-Resale-Market-and-Provide-More-Support-for-First-Time-Home-Buyers
• CPF Board — Can I use my CPF savings for renovation and repairs of my property? (2025-11-07) · https://www.cpf.gov.sg/service/article/can-i-use-my-cpf-savings-for-renovation-and-repairs-of-my-property
• CPF Board — HDB option fee and housing expenses you should know (2026-04-27) · https://www.cpf.gov.sg/member/infohub/educational-resources/hdb-option-fee-and-housing-expenses-you-should-know
• ACRA — Requirements for a Local Company (2026-01-29) · https://www.acra.gov.sg/how-to-guides/before-you-start/requirements-local-company
• ACRA — Overview of managing a variable capital company (VCC) (2026-03-16) · https://www.acra.gov.sg/business-entities/variable-capital-companies
• Family Justice Courts — Apply for probate (2026-06-15) · https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/family/apply-for-probate
• Family Justice Courts — Deputyship (2026-09-28) · https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/family/deputyship
• Ministry of Law — FAQs on Borrowing From Licensed Moneylenders (2015-10-01) · https://rom.mlaw.gov.sg/information-for-borrowers/guide-to-borrowing-from-licensed-moneylenders-english/