Is this the sound of a residential property market dying?

Friday, July 6: After a few years of drought in the residential property market, the heavens opened a few months back and rained en bloc sales, to the excitement of a market that had been turning frigid from inactivity.

But July 6 was a maelstrom for a different reason: The shock announcement the day before - that of an increased Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty (ABSD) and Loan-to-Value (LTV) limits on housing loans - had some of our clients calling emergency board meetings to decide if they should pull the plug on pending real-estate purchases. The additional five per cent payable was enough to make developers rethink their strategies, so thin were their profit margins.

48 hours prior: Not two days before, Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), had labelled the exuberance in Singapore's property market "euphoria". He warned everyone from buyers to developers to "be careful". But there was no time for the market to react to that call to caution. By the following day, the government had made new cooling measures law, effective immediately.