If you’re from the UK then you are probably reasonably familiar with the rightmove.co.uk website. If you’re not then it’s what a large proportion of us Brits will use when we want to rent or buy a house.
As we are moving to Singapore, one of the first priorities is to find somewhere to live (kinda helps even though it’s actually warm enough to sleep on park benches all year round). To this end, I needed to figure out what the equivalent of rightmove.co.uk is.
Being that most things in Singapore are uber-efficient I was expecting the equivalent of rightmove to be the same…all the details you could possibly want accompanied by decent photos, maps of the area, schools etc.
Propertyguru.com.sg appears to be the equivalent ‘go to’ site so I decided to invest some time before we moved and try and work out what the options were for our long term accommodation plan. This would be purely speculative because, until we’ve had a look round, it’s difficult to get a feel for the different areas. The plan is to use AirBnB or get a hotel for a few weeks whilst we explore the various neighborhoods and also for Emily to trial the journey into work via taxi and train. However, with a basic distance from Emily’s work/local underground we could at least get an idea of costs and what we could expect before even setting foot on the island.
Oh dear oh dear, propertyguru.com.sg is NOT like rightmove.co.uk. It seems actually supplying information that would be useful is of secondary importance. No.1 importance on a listing appears to be supplying a smiley photo of the agent representing the property. Given the choice of seeing what size a kitchen is OR seeing how shiny the agents’s suit is, I think you can guess what I find more relevant to my property hunt?
How hard can it be, to go to the property you are representing and take some pics? Ok, 10 years ago it would require the basic abilities to use a digital camera (hardly complicated) but now, you just need your smart phone and you can get some pretty good snaps to impress potential clients.
OR, you could just ignore that basic concept and go on google to screen-grab a view of some street near the property. Of course, this looks a bit lame as it shows up on the advert that there is only one photo. Not a problem, just take grab different ones, a few meters apart down the road!
So, basically, you’ve given me bugger all information there Sumitro. Fail!
Not all adverts feature just the 3 photos though…some feature many more. Steven here below has gone to great trouble to supply a comprehensive list of photos. Oh, hang on…no he hasn’t, he’s snapped the basement under the building, the outside view and can’t even be bothered to correct the images 90°. That’s another fail right there although, wait, there is a video? Maybe he’s redeemed himself by doing a comprehensive video walk through of the property? Er no, it’s the 7 mostly tilt-your-head-sideways-to-view photos arranged into a video slideshow. Another fail as far as I’m concerned…
Maybe this level of lethargy is related to the asking price and therefore the potential commission enticing the agent (percentage based)? I mean, we are only looking at spending a 4 figure sum on rent per month. Curious to see how the market operated at the upper level, I refined my search to properties to buy for, say, 15 million quid ($30million SGD). Surely we’re going to see some SERIOUS time&investment here from Singapore’s finest property agents?
Before I get to what I found…lets just see what you get when you log onto rightmove.co.uk and inform it that you have £15,000,000 to spend…
There you go, you get 25 high quality photos, floor-plans, maps, virtual tour and enough information to at least gauge whether you want to summon your pilot to fly you in the helicopter for a viewing. Lets compare with the same input to the propertyguru.
Awesome! We have a google streetview snap (of course), a streetdirectory screen-grab and then ‘Daryl Ng’ in the corner giving it the thumbs up and the big cheese on top of a random pic of the Singapore skyline nowhere near Holland Park. Being that GCB stands for ‘good class bungalow‘ I’m reasonably confident that the headline picture has nothing to with the property at all…unless it’s some new-fangled bungalow with 11,000 sq ft of surrounding land…perched on top of a skyscraper. If that hadn’t already convinced me to part with the $30,500,000 then surely the exquisitely illustrated ‘Sale’ sticker would cement the deal? That’s the sort of thing I’d expect to see poking out of a basket of $10 trainers down the local market, not slapped over an advert for a $30 mill property! In terms of effort to realise a commission (a slim chance for young Daryl I fear), I probably would have gone to a little bit more effort on the advert.
In fact, I fancy a bit of this real estate malarkey so here’s me seriously investing some time and effort to sell a great property.
That’s only a ‘quite nice’ condo though. To sell something seriously high end, say, Barrack Obama’s house, I feel a little more effort is required. Oh, and a suit to show that I’m a pro, just like Daryl.
Maybe this is just a one off though, surely most agents don’t advertise properties worth more than Wales with such a casual attitude? Yup, they do…
Deviating from the comical nature of some of the adverts, this last property above. Wow, $69,000,000 (£35,000,000)…..3 beds, 4 baths and a ‘quite nice’ garden for the kids to play footy in. How much did Branson pay for an entire island again?? Of course, land is massively at a premium in Singapore but that is a mental amount of money for a 3 bed property just because it’s central and has 1 acre of land. Even if you can split it into two and redevelop…
I digress (as usual), back to the matter of finding a website that accurately showcases properties. After contacting one agent, she then informs me all my problems are over and sends me the link to her website that promises to offer high quality photos and a real insight into the property I might be wishing to rent.
Upon opening the website my first words were genuinely ‘Whaaaaaat the ****….’.
Each of those colorful banners at the top is a link to a property available. The first thing I attempted to do is find the search button so I could narrow it down to the two initial fundamental criteria most people have when looking for a property….where it is and how much it is. Nope, at no point on this website does it actually tell you where the property is or how much you might need to actually live in it! Then, when I started to look at the descriptions I realised that the owners of this website are quite bonkers (in a nice way). Why have a link entitled ‘Holland Village, 3 bed 5 bath, $7000/month negotiable’ when you could replace it with ‘IR40 – A Go Go Ga Ga’. That doesn’t tickle your fancy for whatever reason? Of course, I’ll then gravitate to ‘IR21 – Oh but it’s snazzy’
I’m aware at this point my sarcasm-o-meter is about to burst but, sorry, there is no other method to address this.
Having been lured in by ‘Oh but it’s snazzy’ (and because I have no idea whether it’s in a suitable area or cost bracket we are looking at) I’m greeted with some, admittedly, lovely photos but then the most bizarre descriptions.
Click on a different property and we have more bizarre titles.
Ploughing through the various properties and I found that when a place in question wasn’t worthy of such superlatives, some artistic licence can just be employed.
Or you can just go for a more basic description.
And when you’re really stuck on how to describe something you can, of course, just revert to brutal honesty.
Clearly, my favorite there is the bit where the agent had to think of something nice to say about the dilapidated pond, struggled and gave up. It reminds of the time in German class many years ago where we all had to stand up and tell the class what our pet was in Deutsche. We didn’t have pets so, after assuring Miss Culliford we didn’t even have a goldfish, I was told to stand up and announce to the class, ‘Ich habe keinen hund’ (I don’t have a dog). Genius…
So, after a few hours of searching, I’m not really much that wiser as to what we might be able to rent. Conclusion therefore is to wait until we get to Singapore and start approaching the agents directly. I suspect this will be most entertaining….
randommutterings75 