Know About the Seller Stamp Duty

Posted by clarkcolin03 on October 1st, 2014

To recover the market from the economic crisis of 2009, government of Singapore introduced Seller stamp duty. It is mostly considered to cool off the real estate market, since it was facing a lot of challenges during that period. People were buying properties and selling them off in short duration. Most of them were investors, who just wanted to gain benefit off the real estate industry buying properties at lower prices and selling them at a higher rate to earn good profit.

However, this may be beneficial for some investors, but in general created a havoc in the market, where the property prices were increasing significantly without any reason. Government wanted to control this occurrences, hence come up with the stamp duty imposed on every property that is sold within a short period of time. Seller stamp duty or (SSD) in Singapore is applied on industrial properties as well as private residential properties that are sold within a specific holding period.

The period is determined by calculating the period between the purchasing agreement dates to the selling date of the property. As per the rules of the government in Singapore, seller stamp duty is evaluated on the basis of selling price or the market value, whichever is higher. It is essential for you as seller to discuss it with your real estate broker. There is no way to escape the duty hence either try to sell the property after the time period mentioned in the government ruling or find out more options with help of the real estate broker.

Time period and the Seller stamp duty in Singapore mentioned under this ruling for residential property are:

• Property sold within 1^st year of purchasing will have 16% of selling price or market value applicable as SSD, whichever is higher.
• Property sold within 2^nd year of purchasing will have 12% of selling price or market price whichever is higher, as SSD.
• Property sold within 3^rd year of purchasing will have 8% of selling price or market price whichever is higher as SSD.
• Property sold within 4^th year of purchasing will have 4% of selling price or market price whichever is higher as SSD.

After this, the SSD is not applicable on any residential private property sold after 5 or more years. However the rules are a little different for the industrial property where,

• Within first year of purchasing will have 15% of selling price or market value
• Selling within 2^nd year of purchasing will have 10% of selling price or market value
• Selling within 3^rd year of purchasing will have 5% of selling price or market value.

Discuss with your real estate agent to know more about them.

About the Author

Clark Colin is a Real Estate agent and a blogger. He loves to write about properties available in Singapore, Indonesia etc.