Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said the property market will unlikely crash since the government took action quick enough, reported the media.
“I don’t think the industry will crash, because we moved early enough, and we moved each step of the game, knowing full well that what we do may not be enough, but knowing too well that if we did too much, it may engineer a crash,” said Mr Tharman, who is also Finance Minister, at the DBS Asian Insights Conference.
“So we moved step by step, but we started early, so we avoided a huge bubble. That’s why we won’t see a crash. But I think further correction would not be unexpected,” he added.
Mr Tharman also said market players will determine where the cycle goes.
The government has introduced several rounds of cooling measures to the property market since 2009, including buyer’s and seller’s stamp duties and loan limits such as the Total Debt Servicing Ratio (TDSR) framework. It has also increased the supply of new public housing to meet demand.
The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)’s latest flash estimates showed private residential prices dropped 1.1 percent in Q2 2014 – it’s third consecutive quarterly decline.
Muneerah Bee, Senior Journalist at PropertyGuru, edited this story. To contact her about this or other stories email muneerah@propertyguru.com.sg
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