Singapore adjusts to online means of buying and selling new homes with 75% jump in sales from April

The month of May saw more buyers resuming with their new home purchases with a 75 per cent increase from developers’ April’s sales figures.

“Through this we’ve seen that Singaporeans are generally very adaptable to new experiences. April was the initial period of caution and uncertainty as agents and developers explored new virtual avenues of showcasing their projects and carrying out transactions,” says Mr Karamjit Singh, chief executive of Showsuite Consultancy.

“Having been on an extended circuit-breaker period, activity is gradually resuming as home buyers begin to get on with their purchases. Some developers dished out sweeteners to help overcome the constraints of not being able to physically showcase their projects, which helped move units,” says Mr Singh.

“Developers and agents have been stepping up the use of webinars and virtual tours via video calls in order to walk buyers through various options. Showsuite.com, which is Singapore’s only dedicated new homes portal, experienced a 400% jump in virtual-tour traffic during the circuit-breaker. Showsuite has trained over 1,000 property agents via video calls on the array of interactive forms of project visualizations that is currently available on the portal and the optimal ways of harnessing these for their virtual presentations”.

Out of 57 projects which clocked in sales in May, 14 saw double digit sales. Out of them only two of them had median sale prices of above $2,000 psf, underlining the resilience of the affordable new homes market.