One person for the whole ladder

HDB resale

Selling the flat is where most upgrades begin, and it is where most of my transactions are. A first conversation covers the three numbers off your CPF statement and loan balance, whether to sell first or buy first, and what the flat is worth from the last transactions in your block rather than the asking prices. It also covers whether another flat, rather than a condo, is the better next move. If it is, I say so.

Buying a resale flat is the same discipline in the other direction: valuation and cash over valuation, the remaining lease and what it does to your loan and your CPF usage, and the grants you can actually claim.

Private resale and rental

Condo and landed purchase, and letting out a unit you have decided to keep. On the buy side the work is screening. Two condos in the same district over the same four years can move in opposite directions, one up by about a fifth and its neighbour down, leaving owners waiting more than a decade to exit at under 3% a year. I check every shortlisted project's transaction history and exit profile before you view it.

Then there is the unit itself. Within one good project, identical stacked units have shown gains of several hundred thousand for early entrants and a loss of over two hundred thousand for one buyer who entered at the wrong price. The project can be right and your deal can still be wrong. I will tell you when the unit you love is overpriced.

On rental: a realistic rent from recent leases in the development, a tenant checked properly, and an honest word on whether keeping the unit makes sense against selling it.

New launch

Developer sales, including ECs, and the timing questions that come with buying off plan: progressive payments against your flat's sale date, the TOP date against your move, and the clock on additional duty if you buy before you sell. The gap between new-launch and resale pricing is a lens on the shortlist, not a sales script.

I handle new launches less often than resale, and I will tell you when a resale unit nearby does the same job for less. Every project in URA's developer sales feed is listed under new launches, with the figures URA publishes and nothing added.