The past months have seen Singapore caught up in an en bloc fever. Even as great profits have been made, some found themselves in the predicament of losing their homes.

In response to such cries of foul play, the Minister for Law, Deputy Prime Minister Professor S. Jayakumar, moved to introduce amendments to the procedure for en bloc sales. These changes were introduced with the following objectives in mind:

  1. More transparency
  2. Additional safeguards for all

As outlined in Reading Speech for the Amendment Bill, there are 6 areas of amendments:

  1. Additional consent requirement
  2. Regulation of en bloc sale committees
  3. Regulation of signing and drafting of Collective Sale Agreements
  4. Regulation of mode of sale
  5. Empowerment of Strata Titles Board
  6. Return of moneys in management fund and sinking fund

For the brevity of this article, only a few areas will be touched upon.

Additional Consent Requirement
There will now be an additional condition of requiring consent from the owner of units forming at least 80% of area if the development is more than 10 years and 90% if the development is less than 10 years.

This requirement seems to truly affect only mixed developments. However, while this amendment has been introduced to mitigate the biasness of consent by share value against residential owners in such developments, the impact would be minimal as commercial owners tend to own a large area of the property. It seems that this is an uncomfortable compromise.

Regulation of En Bloc Sale Committees
The amendments can be summarised as such: there must be election of the committee, the committee must be made up by owners or their nominees and there must be disclosure of interest.

While good, there should be a requirement that minority owners should sit in the committee to ensure their views are being heard. In addition, the duties and liabilities of the committees should be clearly spelt out to ensure that people know what they are getting into when they are in the committees.

Empowerment of Strata Titles Board
The Board is now empowered to disregard any technical or irregularity if it is satisfied that the irregularity will not prejudice any owner’s interest.

Strict adherence would definitely defeat the purpose of having rules and would definitely cost more time and money, as was the case in the Horizon Towers saga. Thus, such an amendment should be much welcomed.

However, there is the question of: what amounts to non-prejudice to the owner. Would any small prejudice be reason enough for the Board to reject the application? What if the problem could easily be remedied by damages and costs of dismissing the application would far outweigh the prejudice suffered?

Emily Choo is a second year law student and the Deputy Chief Editor of SLR.