Sunday, June 17, 2018

Sentosa Cove Here I Stay

If you think you have the finances, why not go for a Sentosa Cove property?
If you think you have the finances, why not go for a Sentosa Cove property?
Now that prices have fallen for Sentosa Cove properties, we’re here to tell you how affor…how chea…look never mind. Here’s how much cash you need:

The Sentosa Cove property in question

Here’s the listing you want to look at:
It’s a magnificent semi-detached house, with a seafront view. You get 7,380 square feet, more than enough room to hide whole bricks of cocaine. That’s a random example, no particular reason we picked it.
It’s three storeys tall, with a lap pool at the top, and you have enough room to park four cars. And with five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a private garden, there’s no quicker way to become the inspiration for a new Point of Entry villain.
But let’s get down to the numbers:

How much will you need to start?

The entire Sentosa Cove property costs $17 million. Assuming you get the maximum possible bank loan, you would be able to borrow $13.6 million. That leaves you with a down payment of $3.4 million.
Of this $17 million, up to 15 percent can come from your CPF. I really don’t think you’d have $2.55 million in your CPF, but let’s just say you do. That leaves you with paying a minimum of $850,000 in cash.
With the Buyers Stamp Duty (BSD), that’s an additional $504,600. Let’s assume you’re Singaporean, so there isn’t any ABSD.
After that, you need to handle the conveyancing fees, which are around $3,000, but that looks really irrelevant at this point.
So to start, you’re looking at around $1,357,600.

Then you need to handle the renovations

The costs here are subjective; but if you just bought a Sentosa Cove property, I doubt the bulk of your renovation materials will come from an obscure factory in Jurong. We can take a stab at some costs that are sure to appear though.
Let’s start with getting the flooring done. Marble flooring typically costs around $15 per square foot, and that’s probably what you want for your grand house. So you’ll be paying about $110,700. Labour costs are about $10 per square foot, so altogether the flooring alone should come to $184,500.
Then you have the painting costs. A tiny (comparatively) 1,400 square foot condo costs about $1,800 (three colours). For a three storey tall semi-detached house (doing only the interior), you’re looking at around $5,740.
Carpentry is on a per-foot basis, but it’s typically $200 to $400 per foot for most jobs. Renovation in a typical condo (installing closets, putting in cabinets, etc.) will come to $6,000, and those are way tinier. So it’s fair to assume the cost would be around five times that, conservatively – that’s $30,000.
So without furnishings, you’re looking at around…$220,240.

The monthly repayments for the Sentosa Cove property

Let’s say you get a loan at around 1.8 percent per annum, and you have a 25 year loan tenure. The loan quantum is $13,600,000.
This comes to around $56,329 in payments every month. Over the entire 25 year loan, you will pay a total interest of $3,298,756.
Mind you, the Total Debt Servicing Ratio (TDSR) means your total debt repayments are capped at 60 percent of your income. Assuming you have no other outstanding loans, this also means you need to be earning around $93,882 a month minimum.

Property tax

Let’s make a conservative estimate that rental of the house could fetch $4 per square foot. That’s a rental of $29,520, or about enough to free three ISIS hostages every month. That would give the house an Annual Valuation (AV) of $354,420 a year.
That should bring the property tax (residential rate) to about $45,287 a year.

In total you need…

$1,577,840 without counting furnishings. After that, you’d pay around $721, 235 for the mortgage and taxes, not counting maintenance costs.
Now you know how much you need to earn to buy a Sentosa Cove property.
Or as an alternative, you could take the $17 million, and stay in Raffles Hotel (approx. $600 a night) for 78.7 years.

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