In short, this is the proposed schedule of activities, based on our experience:

1. Search for a good property at a good location

2. Choose a good unit, taking into consideration the feng shui, the direction the house is facing, the surrounding things to take note of, etc. I’ll cover that in another post.

3. Put down a booking fee for the unit.

4. Shop for a good home loan. Go to or call up banks. The trick is to call the banks and get the banker to go to your house for a presentation. During the presentation, ask everything you need to know, including the penalties and perks.

5.  Choose either flexible or conventional plan. Difference is the interest rate and the flexibility. More details should be covered in another post. Personally, we prefer flexible loans, because we factor in the possibility of us earning much more in the future and are able to pay off our housing loan much faster.

6. Once you have found a good home loan deal, get the banker to generate an offer letter. The offer letter will be ready in a few days time. Sign it, in order to lock in the offer. If not, the offer will lapse after the limited period. Check with the banker because the expiry date would be different for different banks.

7. Once you have decided on which bank to take the home loan from, find out the bank’s panel of lawyers. Check if any of the lawyers is also on the panel of lawyers doing up the Sales and Purchase Agreement.

The objective is to have one lawyer handling both the loan documentation and the Sales and Purchase Agreement. Why? So that you can save on lawyer fees, which could range from hundreds to thousands, based on discounts given. Another advantage is that they can get the documentation up faster too, minimizing delays in payments etc, without having to deal with another party.

As for the shopping for home loans from banks, I would leave it to another post.

8. Once you have found the lawyer to do both loan and Sales and Purchase Agreement documentations, set a date to sign the documentations. Could be done on the same day or different days. If it is done on the same day, then it saves you time and hassle.

9.  Sign the documents, pay a deposit for the lawyer fees and wait for the lawyers to get back to you with the stamped documents. Once all the documents are in place, then only you pay the lawyer in full.

10. After that, it is time to anticipate the first draw down,  which also means, time to start paying the home mortgage. Usually the developer draws money from the bank in stages, according to a schedule given in the Sales and Purchase Agreement. Will put up a sample schedule in another post.

11. So, based on the schedule, you can plan your finances properly, in order to minimise the amount of interest you have to pay. Oh, btw, this only applies to flexible loans.

Simple isn’t it? If you practice this often enough, it will become like a second nature to you. Buying a house/property will be like buying rice. Ahh.. how good!