Real Estate Talk!
For friends who are not familiar with Singapore's property purchase terminology, ABSD stands for additional buyer's stamp duty. It is a cooling measure put in place by the government since Dec 2011. It's basically an additional cost for purchasing more than 1 residential properties. Remissible only under certain conditions.
For example, a Singapore citizen (SC) will have to pay 17% more if buying a second property under his/her name. If the 2nd property cost 2m SGD, this is 340k SGD to the national coffers on top of the usual buyers stamp duty.
There's a few ways to avoid paying for ABSD. The most common method is decoupling for a SC couple who owns a private property. Hopefully they are already in a 99/1 tenancy in common arrangement, so the cost of decoupling will be minimal.
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