The ins and outs of owning a property overseas

From the suburbs of Australia to the snowy resorts in Niseko, Singaporeans are venturing overseas in search of a second property. Whether it’s an investment or to be close to your child in university, the process comes with certain costs and trade-offs.
Clarice Lau, head of sales, residential (international project marketing) from Knight Frank Singapore gives Andrea Heng the lay of the land in this week’s Money Talks.  
Here’s an excerpt from the conversation: 
Andrea Heng: 
What do we need to know about buying a place in Europe versus neighboring Asia? What are the key differences?
Clarice Lau: 
For example, like UK, anyone can buy and sell there. It’s a free market. But … in Australia, you can only buy a new built property, meaning you can’t buy a resale. In New Zealand right now, only Singaporeans and Australians can buy a property there.
Understanding of the rule of law and also the taxation regulations, because ultimately when you buy and sell, what are your stamp duties – which is your acquisition cost – and then what is your property tax, your ongoing cost, and then capital gains tax and things like that, or repatriation of profits. 
Andrea: So when it comes to buying property in Singapore … we can use our CPF. Obviously, we can’t do that for our property overseas. So how would you advise clients to fund this overseas property?  
Clarice: Buyers should definitely practice caution and research the financing methods available to them before proceeding to make a decision to invest in a specific city or country. There are overseas property investment mortgage available even from the local banks here in Singapore, such as DBS, UOB, OCBC, Maybank. There are also financing options available from the specific countries that I’ve mentioned.
So generally, buyers do have quite an array of home loans available for them and this is purely just for investment.
Find more episodes of Money Talks here.
A new episode of Money Talks drops every Tuesday. Follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify for the latest updates.
Have a great topic for us? Drop the team an email at cnapodcasts [at] mediacorp.com.sg