If you’re looking for a landed home. There are two main categories; one is the pure landed home where you actually own the land title for the property, and another known as the strata landed or sometimes called cluster houses or townhouses. Today we’re going to talk about three main differences between these two categories.
1. Land Title Versus Strata Title
First up, we are going to talk about the land title in the pure landed section. When you buy a landed home, you own the land that your home actually sits on. So what this means is that today if you buy a landed home, perhaps one that is maybe 20 30 years old, you have the ability to seek approval to tear down the home, and rebuild or redesign this into a different concept through an architect or, getting your builder to redesign the entire home right from the façade of the building, to determine how high it’s going to be, taking into consideration the BCA/URA building restrictions. This provides owners with the flexibility and creative avenue to model their home.
On the other hand, you have the strata houses or cluster homes. With the strata houses, you only technically own the strata airspace like you would if you’d be buying a condominium today. You do not own the rights to the land. So for cluster houses, you cannot then tear down the house even if you’d like to, because you do not technically own the land.
2. Maintenance & Facilities
The second thing that comes with ownership of a strata home is the managing agent(MA) that takes care of the facilities in the strata home. You would normally have communal facilities as you would in a condominium, things like your swimming pool, gym, etc.However, there are also Strata landed developments with no facilities if their land size doesn’t allow for it.
If you are someone that has a family that is growing, and you’d like your kids to have facilities where you live but you still need something of a good size – something with more than four bedrooms, and you probably can’t get this in a condominium, then the strata homes might be something that is suitable for your family. Having said that there is a MA that takes care of the facilities. The other thing that they also actually take care of is your façade of the building, the pavements, the roads, your carpark, and other communal areas. So yes, you do typically get your own carpark lot and with bigger developments maybe 2 carpark lots. And the MA takes care of ensuring that the façade is well taken care of, repainted every five to six years, or if there are like water leakages in your building structure then they will also come in to help you to take care of this.
In a nutshell, the Strata homes require less maintenance for you as the owner, but then with that you have to pay a monthly maintenance fee as well as a sinking fund – commonly known as the MCST fees. So it’s pretty similar to a condominium, it’s just that instead of staying in a high rise, you own a townhouse or a landed home in this gated community.
3. Price Point & Resale
And then the last one we’re going to talk about is the price point. We actually got a question on Instagram where one of our followers asked us, “is it then easier to actually sell a cluster home in future? In terms of “re-sellability” after living there for maybe 5 to 10 years, the family wants to move on.”
Well, there are two sides to the coin. For certain cluster houses, the price quantum is actually more digestible meaning it is quite similar to the older condominiums in the area and less of a premium versus the pure landed segment. Let’s say you are a family, and you need like four or five bedrooms but you want more space, but you do not have that budget that allows you to go for a pure landed home. Then, perhaps a cluster home might be something that you can consider.
Another thing to consider if you move to the pure landed would be the higher maintenance budget that you require and you need to spend a bit more time in terms of taking care of your home of things like your garden, your lawn, to your structure of the building, when you will need to repaint, to managing the cleaning services for your pool if there is a pool or jacuzzi in your home.
At the end of the day, it boils down to whether you’d have the time to go and manage your home, or you’d prefer for someone else like a third party to actually take care of it.
Coming back to the part of “resellability” I think it really depends on a few factors. It is very subjective depending on the area you are considering, as well as what you’re actually looking for at the end of the day to fit your lifestyle and family needs. Are you someone that is a little more creative who wants to go into like architectural design of your home, basically demolish the old home and rebuild a totally new one from the outside to the interior as well. It really boils down to individual preferences.
Just to sum up basically we talked about three things one is that the land title deed is different – a cluster house will have a strata title and for a pure landed you own the land title. Number two we also talked about the maintenance fees of the place and also spending time to actually upkeep your property, and the third thing we actually talked about is the price quantum.
