Attended the seminar last week and the crowd was huge compared to the workshop by another company last year. However, I would think 1/3 of them are agents seated with their clients. I wonder if this is a industry practice. There were two speakers Alfred Chia, CEO SingCapital and Mohamed Ismail, CEO PropNex. Here's are the key take aways:

• Keep your credit card statements.  Alfred mention an incident where a well to do individual went ahead to make a purchase without getting a loan because he was confident that he could get it. However the bank require his credit card statements and they have to scramble to call up each bank and managed to get the required statements in the nick of time. Alfred did not mention how long you need to keep your statements but I would personally keep it for one year.
• Invest in a Real Estate Fund if you cannot afford a property.
• It is a buyers market but it is also a tenant market.
• The time to buy is now.
• A sign where developers are desperate to sell is when they have demolished their show flat and there are still unsold units. However, in my opinion these are usually the bigger units.
• Although private property prices have been dropping, we are not seeing an equivalent increase in people selling. This shows that most property owners have holding power.
• Due to low interest rates, sellers have no motivation to sell and buyers are waiting for prices to drop further.
• There is a limit as to how much private property can drop because ECs and BTO will also have to drop. If the fall is too steep, many HDB owners will be unhappy.
• Ismail showed a diagram on the price range of each property category. He advise to buy at the low end of each range so that when there is a correction, you will not be too affected.
• Ismail recommend to buy EC as a one time opportunity before the resale levy kicks in. There are four ECs coming after which the ECs after them will have the levy. No surprise that PropNex is marketing those four.
• He predicts that HDB prices will drop 5 to 8% annually till 2016 before picking up again in 2017. He provided a calculation and some news articles to substantiate his point.

In my opinion, unless you have enough cash to pay for the property in full, it is no longer the single most important factor. TDSR is now the most important factor in determining the type of property I can purchase and I plan to look for a banker calculate exactly how much I can loan. Any recommendations is greatly appreciated.