From 10 March 2014, the Housing Development Board only accepts valuation requests from resale flat buyers or their property agents after granting the Option to Purchase by the sellers. The Revised HDB Resale Procedure is believed to encourage buyers and sellers to focus their price discussions on the recent sales transactions, rather than the Cash Over Valuation (COV) that sellers expect buyers to pay on top of the flat’s value. Since when have HDB flats become a goldmine? Back in 1996, 2007 and 2010-2013, the media liked to pick up stories of HDB sales transactions that came with very high COVs, sometimes up to $100,000 to $150,000. There were also reports that mentioned extreme cases with the transaction prices of HDB flats crossing the one million dollar mark. These might be exceptional incidents but were often considered by reporters as ‘newsworthy’ stories to cover in the paper. Nonetheless, the stories ......