Minister for National Development Chee Hong Tat announced four pro-enterprise measures for developers and enhanced support for home-buyers.
The first is an improvement in the TOL or temporary occupation limit process. The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and Singapore Land Authority (SLA) have a list of pre-identified sites available through SLA’s portal of TOL sites, which will enable developers to enjoy significant time savings of about six weeks and halve the time it takes to obtain agencies' approvals.
Secondly, there are updates on the Construction Quality Assessment System (Conquas) for private residential developments. The focus will be on functionality and liveability defects that matter to homeowners, such as water seepage and the like. Homeowners can look forward to better-quality homes with fewer defects that impact functionality and liveability. Developers and builders will enjoy time savings through more efficient assessments.
Firms with consistently good Conquas bandings will enjoy 20% time savings from their assessment durations.
Third, regulations will be enhanced to protect home-buyers. These include developers having to furnish additional details on new housing processes in sales documents.
Developers’ track record will be available to home buyers including the Conquas bands of their past projects. This will allow prospective buyers to compare developers' project quality standards and identify developers that have built consistently good quality projects.
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Corenet X, which is the new method of developers’ submission process, will be streamlined further for more efficiency and cost savings.
“The changes are not significant in that they don’t change market fundamentals. However they raise the standards of developers. They also help to improve consumer knowledge. Consumers will be able do additional research on developers,” observes Desmond Sim, CEO of ETC.
Market-watchers add that developers in the higher bands will benefit while developers in the lower bands may face increased challenges.
