So I need to get this off my chest because I’ve been stewing on this for months and my wife is done hearing about it.
We bought our HDB in Bukit Batok in 2023. 4-room resale, paid $565,000 for it which already felt like we were getting robbed at the time, but that’s the Singapore market and we needed a place to live. Combined income is decent — my wife and I bring in around $11,000 a month together. We’re not struggling. We save, we don’t do stupid things with money, we max out our SRS, we have a small portfolio of Singapore REITs and some blue chips. We’re trying to do the responsible adult thing.
Here’s the problem. We are currently sitting in year three of our MOP. Which means we cannot own any overseas residential property until 2028 at the earliest. Five years from the date of purchase. That’s the rule. Non-negotiable.
And normally I could just accept that and get on with life. But the last twelve months have genuinely been painful because I found something I actually want to buy and I am legally blocked from doing it.
Let me explain what happened.
Late last year a colleague of mine — guy I’ve known for about six years, steady head, not a gambler — told me he’d bought a small apartment in Osaka. Not a new launch, a secondary market unit in a quieter residential neighbourhood, older building, bought it for around 18 million yen. At today’s exchange rate that’s roughly SGD $160,000. He put in about $45,000 cash as down payment and financed the rest through a Japanese bank at an interest rate that would make your average Singaporean mortgage look criminal by comparison. Japan has had rock-bottom rates for so long that borrowing there is almost surreal.
He walked me through the numbers. Gross rental yield in the area was running at around 6 to 7 percent. The yen has been weak for a while now, which means entry costs in SGD terms are lower than they’ve been in a long time. Japan as a country is actively courting foreign property buyers, there’s no equivalent of Singapore’s Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty killing your returns on day one, and the legal framework for foreign ownership is actually quite clean. On top of that, Japanese tourism has been consistently strong and short-term rental demand in certain cities remains solid.
I went home that night and spent four hours reading everything I could find. Forums, investment blogs, YouTube deep dives, actual threads on Reddit from people who had done it. The more I read, the more convinced I became that this was a real opportunity — not a get-rich-quick scheme, not some dodgy developer promising guaranteed returns, just a boring, sensible property in a stable country with decent fundamentals.
I have $50,000 sitting in a savings account right now earning interest that barely keeps up with inflation. I have the down payment. I have the risk appetite. I’ve done more due diligence on this than I did on my own HDB purchase honestly.
And I cannot do a single thing about it until 2028.
Because I live in a subsidized HDB flat that I haven’t held for five years yet, I am legally prohibited from owning any overseas residential property. This isn’t a grey area or something I can finesse. HDB audits this. People have been caught and forced to divest. In serious cases, action gets taken on the HDB flat itself. I’m not going to be stupid and risk my family’s home over this. But that doesn’t make it any less maddening to sit here and watch.
And here is the part that actually keeps me up at night — it’s the timing problem.
The yen is weak right now. Nobody knows for how long. Japan’s central bank has been making noises about normalizing rates, and if that happens meaningfully, the yen strengthens, property prices in yen potentially adjust, and the entire equation changes. The window I’m looking at right now — weak yen, low entry prices in SGD terms, reasonable financing — might not exist in 2028. Currency moves are unpredictable. I could wait out my MOP faithfully, do everything right, and emerge in two years to find that the moment has passed and the same unit now costs me $220,000 SGD equivalent instead of $160,000.
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s just how exchange rates work.
My colleague who bought in Osaka — he’s already collected almost eighteen months of rental income. His tenant is a young Japanese salaryman who pays on time every month. My colleague doesn’t think about that apartment very much anymore. It just runs. Meanwhile I’m here refreshing property listings I can’t act on.
I want to be fair about this. I understand the logic behind the MOP. The HDB flat was subsidized. The government doesn’t want people treating public housing as a quick-flip investment vehicle. If there was no MOP, you’d have people buying HDB for the subsidy and immediately leveraging it to build private portfolios while the flat sits empty or gets rented out illegally on day one. The policy has a reason. I’m not pretending it doesn’t.
But the specific rule that bans overseas property ownership during MOP — that’s the part I struggle with. My Japanese apartment investment has zero effect on the Singapore housing market. I’m not subletting my HDB. I’m not flipping anything. I’m not gaming any subsidy. I’m just trying to put my own cash savings into an asset in another country because I believe it’s a good investment. The connection between that decision and my HDB flat feels tenuous at best.
What makes it sting more is thinking about who this rule actually bites. If you’re wealthy enough to have bought private property in Singapore, no MOP. If you’re wealthy enough to invest cash without needing to structure anything through your HDB status, you work around it. The people most affected are people in my exact bracket — dual income, HDB, trying to build wealth beyond CPF and REITs, doing the reading, doing the work, having the money ready — and being told to wait in line.
Two more years. I’ll hit MOP in 2028 and the first thing I’m doing is calling that property agent in Japan. Whatever the market looks like then, I’m going in. But right now I’m just watching and waiting and trying not to think too hard about what the yen is doing.
Edit: Yes I know about REITs. Yes I own J-REITs already. It’s not the same thing and you know it’s not the same thing.