The Hidden Costs Of Property Selling: Unveiling The Real Cost Behind Agent Commissions In Singapore

Hang around on forums or in coffee shops (or anywhere in Singapore really), and you’re bound to hear complaints about property agent commissions. A common impression is that realtors hike up their commissions for even “simple” jobs, like listing your property. But in reality, listing your property on a portal is way more expensive than most people imagine; and the cost of these listings may explain why agents need to charge so much more. We asked some agents about the costs they typically pay:

Property portals are more expensive than most people assume

We’re not going to name any specific portal here, lest we get into legal trouble. But we’re sure that, if you’ve ever bought or sold a property, you’ve visited a few of the bigger ones. Well, here’s how much they might pay, based on the rates of a popular local portal:

The cost of the package is something that agents pay for every year. The more premium tiers also tend to include bonuses, such as the bigger or more images being allowed for the listing, or longer descriptions. 

However, it’s not enough to just buy a package and put up a listing. As more listings pile onto the portal, your listing starts to fall from visibility. Think of it as how a post on Instagram, Reddit, or other such sites gets “buried” by newer posts, and the only way to keep it prominent is to have more likes, shares, etc. 

On a property portal, there are no likes, shares, karma, etc., so agents need to pay to keep refreshing your listing. The more they pay, the more credits, tokens, coins, etc., they can spend to push your listing back to the top. 

It’s this process of constantly refreshing your listing, and trying to keep it high on the list, that ends up being the bulk of the cost. We spoke to an agent, who showed us their typical spend for different listing types:

Rental Listing (HDB) Cost By Type

Rental Listing (HDB) Cost By Period

Sale Listing (Sub Sale) Cost By Type

Sale Listing (Sub Sale) Cost By Period

Sale Listing (Resale with lesser competition) Cost By Type

Sale Listing (Resale with lesser competition) Cost By Period

Sale Listing (Resale HDB) Cost By Type

Sale Listing (Resale HDB) Cost By Period

Without going into the details of boosts, reposts, etc., suffice it to say that these are used to increase the listing’s visibility. The more an agent spends on these, the more buyers are likely to see or even notice your listing.

Note the significant costs for even simple listings, like HDB rental listings

The numbers above don’t reflect a particularly aggressive marketing effort – this is perhaps somewhere in the middle, in terms of marketing spend. 

And yet, even something as simple as HDB flats for rental can rack up over $500 per week. For the sale listings, which reach over $915 per week, the agent told us this was for a resale with lower competition. 

If there happens to be a lot of competition (e.g., you’re selling a sub-sale unit in a mega-development, where there may be hundreds of other listings in your project), the cost of this can climb much higher if you want to get your listing seen. 

This is one of the reasons some agents dislike high-competition listings: sellers will not pay higher commissions (unless convinced by the agent that it’s necessary to compete), even though the agent must spend more to push the listing. 

Property agents may not have a choice, even if portals are expensive

Many agents we spoke to have a love/hate relationship with property portals. Almost all of them concede that portals are the best way to find prospective buyers – this is now the “normal” way to browse property listings, whether they like it or not. 

However, this leaves agents at the mercy of whatever the portals want to charge. In August 2019, for example, a leading portal was reported to have ramped up prices by a further 20 per cent, although the last price hike was two years before that. 

Agents have no choice but to pay this, as most alternative methods like flyers, classified ads, and roadshows are still playing second-fiddle to the power of online searches. As for the alternative methods that do work, they tend to ramp up commissions even more. 

One agent noted that in recent years:

“Making videos has become the next most viable way, and more agents are starting to do this; but the cost of making videos can include staging, can include videography, and it’s much more time consuming than just making a listing.” 

As such, commissions can end up rising to three per cent or more (versus a norm of two per cent) – so the closest rival to the property portal is in fact more expensive. That doesn’t leave much room for commissions to come down. 

Portals are also driving the market toward exclusive deals

If you don’t agree to work exclusively with one agent (i.e., you’ll pay the commission to any agent who happens to sell your property), the property portal system puts you at a disadvantage. 

This is due to the risk that an agent may spend their credits refreshing your listing to the top, only to find someone else closes the deal and gets the commissions. 

So when you don’t have an exclusive deal, it’s likely that every agent will just put your property on the backburner: they may put up your listing, but they won’t risk spending more credits to boost it. This is unlikely to be seen especially for higher competition listings, as most visitors to a portal won’t even click past the first two or three pages of searched results. 

The cost of listings is one of the least visible factors to home sellers

It’s ironic that higher commissions can actually be easier to justify: when a property agent whips out all the bells and whistles, stages the house, and makes a professional video, sellers may not mind paying an extra percentage point or two in commissions. They can see the effort going into it. 

However, almost no one is impressed by their realtor showing how frequently she boosted their listing. This is just more abstract, and sellers may not grasp that agents can spend close to a thousand dollars a week for something as basic as making their listing visible.

This may be a subtle reason we’re seeing a shift toward realtors going into video, even if it means higher fees for their clients. In any case, if you’re bothered by the kind of commissions you’re paying, you now know where a decent chunk of it goes.