Grand Dunman Condo TOP Fast-Tracked With Virtual Inspection

After the excitement of successfully buying a new condominium unit, the final milestone for most new owners is collecting the keys to their new home. For the owners of Grand Dunman, they’ve had the benefit of collecting their keys at least two months ahead of schedule.

When the 1,008-unit project launched for sale in July 2023, the developer – SingHaiyi – had put the expected Temporary Occupation Permit (TOP) of the project somewhere in September or October this year.

But the Dunman Road project was one of the developments that took part in a pilot for a new Whole-of-Government virtual inspection (WOG VI) process, led by the Building and Construction Authority (BCA). The other project was Macpherson Weave, a Built-To-Order (BTO) project.

The pilot was publicly shared for the first time by Alvin Tan, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and National Development, on Sept 2 during this years’ International Built Environment Week.

The outcome of the pilot project means that developers can apply to use virtual inspections to shorten the TOP and Certificate of Statutory Completion (CSC) inspections immediately. In the construction process, the CSC is the later of the two, and is the final certificate issued once a development has cleared all statutory requirements.

In the past, a developer’s project team had to apply to several government agencies separately and coordinate a physical inspection for every one, once the bulk of construction works were complete.

In total, eight government agencies have to sign off before a TOP is issued: the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Land Transport Authority (LTA), National Environment Agency (NEA), National Parks Board (NParks), Public Utilities Board (PUB), Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).

“Physical site inspections for TOP and CSC have traditionally required multiple teams from different agencies walking the site at different times. It is time-consuming and resource-heavy,” says Tan.

Project teams can now submit 360-degree scans instead, and government agencies can access this progressively as different phases of the construction are completed. BCA says the process can bring TOP approval forward by up to two months, based on the findings as a result of the pilot project.

Seven more agencies have joined a process BCA has run since 2024

So far, BCA has run more than 130 of its own checks using virtual inspections. The developments it has inspected this way include public and private housing as well as commercial and industrial buildings.

The statutory board, which is under the Ministry of National Development, says that those virtual checks delivered productivity savings of up to 50% for its inspection teams and developer project teams.

The initiative to introduce virtual TOP inspections came from the Action Team to Improve Built Environment Productivity, set up earlier this year to bring government agencies and industry leaders into the same room and modernise processes that no longer match the digital tools available.

Developer project teams choose whether to apply for a virtual inspection instead of a physical one, and are encouraged to do so where it would make the work run more smoothly. The main contractor captures the scan on site, and attaches photographs wherever a measurement needs verifying, since a 360 image cannot identify a dimension by itself.

As the development is progressively completed, these 360-degree scans can be submitted gradually as each area of a project is finished, instead of waiting until the whole development is complete.

The eight government agencies have published a WOG VI Guidebook, setting out what each of them needs to see as part of this virtual inspection process.

Two months of earlier keys are worth about $7,800 in rent

By and large, most new condo owners barely give a second thought about the construction process. But all of them watch with eager eyes once the developer announces the start of the key collection.

This usually comes after a development attains its TOP, which is only issued after each agency has cleared its checks. Thereafter, the developer can start scheduling key collection for the new owners.

The other housing project involved in the pilot was MacPherson Weave, a 1,382-unit project at Circuit Road in Geylang. This development was launched in the May 2021 BTO sales exercise.

Although the entire development consists of seven residential blocks, only one block was selected to go through the virtual inspection pilot. But BCA says that this was enough to save measurable man-hours. Across the two pilots, manpower savings on the inspection work saw a 30% reduction in time and overall effort.

If this new virtual inspection is able to shave off at least two months’ wait for these new owners, it will have a direct impact on their pockets. At Grand Dunman, roughly 900 households stand to benefit from a shorter waiting time.

The median rent for non-landed homes in District 15, where Grand Dunman is located, was about $5.04 psf a month in 2Q2026, based on a compilation of URA rental data across 46 projects. A median 775 sq ft unit at that rate works out to about $3,900 a month, which puts two months of waiting at roughly $7,800 in rent.

While some new owners may be new to the area, a good proportion of the owners at Grand Dunman will likely be residents of the area, and by now would have likely sold their previous home in anticipation of moving into the recently completed condo.

This benefits both kinds of buyers at Grand Dunman: an owner-occupier who is renting while they wait for the building to complete stops paying that rent two months sooner, and a landlord starts collecting theirs that much earlier.

On the flip side, when a condo attains its TOP, that’s also when the biggest component of your home loan is disbursed, so homeowners will begin paying a larger mortgage instalment two months earlier.

Defects surface earlier, but some checks have their limitations

Under the conventional route, a routine physical inspection that picks up a defect surfaces only when the agency inspects at the end of the construction. By then there’s a good chance that the error has been replicated across multiple units, and the fix has to be repeated across the whole project.

But if inspections can be done as parts of the development are completed, defects and errors can be caught early on and rectified earlier.

“The value of WOG VI was not only reducing physical inspections, but enabling a process where project teams and agencies can identify compliance issues earlier, review them progressively, and reduce the pressure that project teams typically face at the TOP stage to meet all the regulatory agencies’ requirements,” says Lim Hwee Chim, General Manager at SingHaiyi Group.

But this has its limits too, since the virtual inspection can only conduct visual checks, there’s a chance that spatial errors, like incorrect dimensions or other functional mistakes, won’t be captured in a 3D or 360-degree scan. Functional checks such as ventilation requirements cannot be read from an image at all, so those are still done physically, on a random audit basis.

Agencies can also ask for further scans, or send someone down to the site themselves, if a virtual capture does not suffice. The standard of these checks is not compromised; and the government’s roll out of the virtual inspection only shortens the time taken to clear them.

In general, the pilot project focused on residential buildings, since they carry the most regulatory checks of any building type, and because the process is quicker when it comes to high-rise buildings with many repeatable components.

BCA has been upfront that the limit for now is the learning curve, which runs on both sides: project teams have to capture a scan that agencies can actually clear, while the agencies work out which of their checks belong in the process.

The adoption rate by developers to determine how widely-used virtual inspections become

For now, opting for virtual inspections is at the developer’s discretion, and the projected time saved (two months) is based on the result of a two-project pilot.

But since TOP is when the biggest payment instalment is due, developers have their own reason to adopt the process, and an earlier permit puts the money in their hands two months sooner.

It is clear that BCA, and other government agencies with a stake in the built environment, see the positive impact that transformational digital tools can offer throughout the building process, with WOG VI on the inspection side and CORENET X handling building-plan submissions.

Whether that adds up to a faster route to TOP across the industry, or stays an option that only a handful of large projects use, is what the coming year of applications will show.