Our Housebuying experience

As i went into the housebuying experience a complete property noob, I certainly learnt alot frm it. Catechol's much better, as he has some property agent contacts and a good friend who is a successful property agent, so he's privy to quite a few of their tricks (lesson of the day: Any good property agent will have a basketful of tricks).
I thought i'd write this entry not only cos it's amusing, but also it's a reminder to the future house-buying me: We went into this with the main goal of getting an affordable temporary house with a stringent set of criteria and a good knowledge of what makes property agents tick, and yet.. faced with the pressures of bidding war and the emotional stress of it all, we still almost succumbed to emotion and nearly overpaid for a house before settling on this one (more on that later).
Anyway hope this helps:

The Mie And Liang Unorthodox guide to buying a house:

Step 1: Know your finances

Because the property market is against buyers currently, our plan is to buy a small temporary house first and wait for the prices to drop, our initial plan was to rent but the rental prices are also exhorbitant, the sums worked out to be that buying a 3 rm flat is still most affordable.
Know all the stamp duty, legal fees and agent fees and whatever cash you need to pay upfront, we have met some agents who tried to 'scare' us into buying by calculating amount and saying 'you see, this house cov low already and the upfront cash is still so much. You want to buy another house, the cov might be higher, do you have that amount of cash on hand?", some agents even quoted us the wrong legal fees and tried to con us into giving a larger amt of agent fee.

We initally attempted to apply for HDB loan, but after using up a whole month of patience with emails, phone calls and delay tactics, Liang decided to go for bank loan. Any 'good' property agent will ask you if your bank loan has been settled, and if your reply is negative, they will offer to 'help' you with a recommendation. (If you want me to spell out why this is not such a gd idea, you can ask me in person.)
With regards to which bank loan is the best, I seriously have no idea (refer Liang), I'm sure I had a blank look on my face when the loan officer attempted to explain the terms of loan to me (probably the same blank look whenever Prof C tries to teach during rounds).
Housing loan interest is one of the lowest in s'pore, so we took up full loan and put the money to greater use in investments. (This is obviously quoted blindly from Liang, I can't give u more details cos it was too cheem and I drifted off after the second sentence when Liang was explaining to me.. ssh.. dun tell him that)
Interesting property fact: do you know that if you were to buy condo/private property in geylang, no local bank will be willing to give u the mortgage? Haha they so biased.
Anyway, pls refer to Liang if you have any questions on the finances part of the deal, you know i'm useless in this aspect... yawn.....

Step 2: Know your wishes
According to Liang, in order to not pay premium price or fall madly in love with a house, we need to keep a clear mind and follow strictly a list of criteria (shrugs shoulders)

Liang's wishes:
1) Near his house
2) Reasonable price

My wishes:
1) Either walking distance to mrt OR access to at least 10 bus routes
2) Not lower than 7th floor
3) Near Liang's house
4) Near at least 2 hospitals
5) Within 3 mrt stops to my house
6) Near food (i figured i've had enough of living on top of a hill)
7) Must not be very old
.
.
And the list went on, and new wishes have a tendency to be added unpredictably, so in the end, my wishing rights were stripped and I was only limited to top 3 wishes.

Based on these criteria, we shortlisted a few neighbourhoods to base our search on, but after awhile we realised that most of the flats there are 4 to 5 room flats.

This was also the time when suddenly my dad decide to make known his wishes:
1) Door facing must be certain direction - northeast, northwest, west, southwest (he even drew us a compass and when I expressed my abject horror, he said 'u lucky both u and Liang have same direction so still got 50% of the directions mah')
2) Must not be in 'seedy' neighbourhood
3) Must have some 'greenery' like park or hill around (it's some feng shui thingy, i suspect this is the reason why i need to climb a hill home everyday of my 27 years)
4) Past owners must not have 'bad vibes' eg. divorce. (He even asked me why one couple did not have children even though they were married for 6 years.)
5) Must be approved by Sandy first (apparently Sandy will be able to tell us if there are ghosts around, i think he much over-estimated Sandy's abilities.)

When I objected vehemently to all these saying we already have a hard time finding a house, without all his added nonsense, he just very nonchalantly said, "when the house is right for you, everything will just come naturally into place." -_-'++
[Some of his nonsense got to Liang, who got a great kick out of the fact that our final choice is a 'natural west' as he likes to call it]

Step 3: Don't be ruled by emotions
After a long time in fruitless searching through the property ads, we finally chanced across a semi-suitable flat in an area walking distance to Liang's house, and best of all, it is on the 16th floor which is the top floor of the block. [Interesting property fact number 2: why is it that when agents advertise that the flat is above xth floor, the actual floor is x+2 without fail??? Is there some unspoken agent rule??? Liang and i are very perturbed by this.]

i fell in love with the view, fell in love with the neighbourhood though the flat itself is rather rundown. Only problem is... yes... the door. We stood at the door for a good 5 min peering at a compass needle that flickers between north and north-west each second. So I called my dad, and he says if we really like the flat, we can actually tilt the door (thus Liang coined the term 'natural west' and 'fake west') My dad even took a cab down to check out the area and gave his stamp of approval (it's next to a hill). So happily, we put a bid for the flat, which Liang tot was quite a gd bid but I was afraid that it wasn't good enough because it was a good 8000 below the asking price. But becos Liang was so confident (he kept bragging that his Valentine's present to me is a house), I also got quite excited and started dreaming abt the renovation. So of course, we lost the bid. Someone offered cov of $39 000! Naturally, I got very, very upset and disappointed because I guess I really thought that we could get that house. I think Liang felt really, really guilty, because after that he suggested expanding our search to 4 room flats as well.

Step 4: Know your opponent

Between that house and our last choice, we spent countless hours at viewings, I took extended lunch breaks in the middle of a work day, skipped mmed lectures, left early for gatherings, left way early for P's hen night (sorry dear) and almost had to go for second appointment in the sari for P's wedding.

In between, we got played by very experienced agents, agents who instituted a bidding war with some other 'invisible' party, agents who dropped us like a brick once they realised that we have no interest in using their recommended buyer's agent... Through it all, Liang kind of became the emotional one because he felt so bad that he 'lost' me that first house which i liked so much and he became amiable to the ridiculous demands and prices of the various agents.

The last viewing was the most memorable. We actually already had a verbal agreement with the owner of our now house but a new listing in a different block in the same neighbourhood came up and we tot we'd go and see. I made the mistake of admitting that i prefer the new house cos of the view and the renovation. So when the owner made the ridiculous demand of 30k cov regardless of valuation (beware in instances where valuation is not out yet), Liang agreed, and I had to hurriedly jump in and insist on a cap and sort of got into a civilised argument with the owner (who was VERY rude and an absolute b*tch). So without even discussing with Liang, I rejected her. (which turned out to be a very good thing indeed because we later found out that the actual valuation was 10k above what we estimated).

Step 5: 'Fate' might really lend a helping hand

I guess fate dictates that we should stick with our original owner and not back out on him, also as Liang kept emphasising it was a 'natural west'.
The now house is actually in the same block as the very first flat we went to and is better cos it's a corner unit. (So my parents had already liked the place, and after making yet another trip down there to check out the 'vibes' of the door of particular flat, they approved.) But i didn't let myself fall in love with it, partly cos i don't want to be disapointed and secondly, I was freakin pissed off by the seller agent.

She was a total nincompoop and I caught her lying to my face not once but 3 times in the first viewing. When I tried to explain to her that she got her facts wrong about the resale prices of the units in the area (naturally we are familiar since we went to see the very flats that she mentioned), she just looked embarassed then rudely argued with me.
In the course of our dealings with her over the past few weeks, she was rude and ignorant and made a whole lot of mistakes which i need to clean up for her (I was even more familiar than her in the hdb application procedure and form filling... grrrrr).
But whenever Liang complains abt her (he gets very annoyed cos she calls him 'Tan Ah!' on the phone for some weird reason), I would remind him, if not for her laziness and incompetence, we probably wouldn't have managed to successfully close the deal.
I mean, how many agents would willingly let us have a face-to-face negotiation with the seller himself without trying to increase the price and we actually managed to push the price down to 4k below asking? (the seller is quite a nice guy actually, we know cos we spent 2 hours chatting with him to build rapport while the agent just stood by and join us in small talk) And how many agents when they found out that even though we're unrepresented we refuse their buyer agent and still let us continue with negotiation? The best part is, cos she did not have otp on hand, we only had a verbal agreement on the deal, so when we called her again 1 week later, I half-expected her to say that the house had been sold to someone else for a higher price already, but she didn't! She really just close shop and spent the week sleeping at home!

And that concludes our house buying adventure (well, we still have to suffer through few more appointments with hdb and the nincompoop agent, i just hope she doesn't screw up again. We had to call her a few days ago to tell her to amend her forms cos she filled up the date wrongly).

Oh and the time that i left P's hen-night early and the appointment after P's wedding? That was the viewing for this house... =)