Signalling that the Government is not intending to relax property cooling measures any time soon, DPM and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said yesterday there is “some distance to go in achieving a meaningful correction”. “If we do not get a meaningful reversal after each upswing, property prices will run ahead of the growth of household incomes over the long term, which we should avoid,” said Mr Tharman, who was speaking at Credit Counselling Singapore’s 10th anniversary lunch. He noted that there has been some correction in both private property prices and HDB resale prices over the last four to five quarters, following the sharp run-up in recent years. “We can never get rid of cycles in the property market, with the upswings in some years being followed by corrections. Our cooling measures cannot eliminate the cycle, but they aim to temper it,” he said. “What this means is avoiding a bubble during the upswing and allowing for a correction in prices subsequently.”... Continue Reading