The Owners Who Needed a Unanimous Vote — and the Letter That Changed the Law

Imagine owning a home in a development of 751 flats, and being told that to sell the building collectively, every one of the 751 owners must agree. Plus the owner of the land underneath, who is not one of you.

Not 80%. Not 90%. All of them. Every estate, every executor of every deceased owner's estate, every co-owner in a divorce that has not concluded, every unit whose registered owner has moved abroad and stopped answering letters.

That is not a hypothetical. It has been the legal position for a small number of Singapore developments — not because anyone designed it that way, but because they were built in a form the collective sale regime, written in 1999 for strata title, never covered.

The flat owners hold long leases over their own units. Somebody else owns the land. And in law those two things have to be reconciled before anything can be sold, which in practice has meant: they cannot be.

Singapore's collective sale framework runs on strata title. Each owner holds a defined share value in a management corporation, and the thresholds — 80%, 90%, and under this Bill 70% and 65% — are measured against those share values and against strata area.

A non-strata development has none of that machinery. As The Straits Times described it, these are private residential developments where the flat owners own long leases but do not own the underlying land. There is no strata share value to count, and there is a separate landowner whose interest has to be dealt with.

So the default rule applied instead: everyone with an interest must agree. Which is a coherent legal position and a hopeless practical one.

Meanwhile the buildings kept ageing, exactly like every other development of their vintage — the same lift replacements, the same roof works, the same sinking fund arithmetic — with the one exit route that Singapore's private housing market relies on effectively closed to them.

The sequence, as reported by The Straits Times, is unusually short.

In November 2025, a letter from the Neptune Court Owners' Association circulated online, suggesting that the threshold for properties sold en bloc could be lowered. In the same month, the Ministry of Law said it was reviewing policies and regulations under the Land Titles (Strata) Act.

Nine months later a Bill was in Parliament — one that lowers consent thresholds for ageing strata developments, tightens the procedure around collective sales generally, and brings non-strata developments into the regime for the first time.

It would be too neat to say one letter did all of that; the ministry also reported multiple rounds of consultation since 2023 with academics, lawyers, property consultants, industry associations, developers and strata titles board representatives. But the reporting places the letter first in the public timeline, and the Bill's non-strata limb reads like it was written with that specific problem in view.

This is the technical heart of it, and it is more intuitive than it sounds.

If you hold a lease over your flat that runs for 850 years or more, then whatever the landowner still holds is, economically, almost nothing. The land will not come back to them in any meaningful sense. The law reflects that: as reported, the landowner's interest in such cases is deemed to be of nominal value, precisely because it sits underneath flat leases of at least 850 years — and the landowner is deemed to have transferred that interest to the purchaser without consideration on the issue of a collective sale order.

So where the leases are that long, majority-consent collective sale has already been possible.

The Bill's extension, as The Straits Times reports it, is to developments whose flat owners hold leases of less than 850 years. They would get the same rights — a collective sale by majority consent rather than unanimity — with safeguards to protect the landowner's interest, which in their case is not nominal and cannot simply be deemed away.

What those safeguards look like in the drafted provisions is the detail to watch as the Bill moves through Parliament. It is the difference between a workable route and a theoretical one.

The Straits Times named five examples. We looked each of them up in our own directory of private non-landed developments to see what we hold.

Two things stand out.

Neptune Court is the outlier by size. At 751 homes it is larger than the other four put together, which is why it has the organised owners' association, and why its letter carried weight. Marine Parade, completed 1975, fifty-one years old.

Orchard Court's 993-year tenure is the shape of the problem. A near-millennium lease is exactly the structure the 850-year rule was written around — the land is nominally someone else's, and functionally the flat owners'.

We hold no record for Paterson Court at all, which is itself telling: these buildings sit far enough outside the normal strata universe that they are patchily covered even in a directory built for it.

It is worth separating three questions that get collapsed into one.

Can it legally be sold collectively? Under the current framework, only with unanimous agreement between flat owners and the landowner — which for a 751-home development is close to impossible. Under the Bill, by majority consent. That is a genuine change.

Do the owners want to? An owners' association writing to suggest a lower threshold indicates real interest, but it is not a vote, and 751 households will not be of one mind about it.

Would anyone buy it? That is a land question — plot ratio, permitted use, what a developer can build and sell — and no legislative change answers it. The collective sale market has been largely tepid since the 2018 boom.

A lower threshold changes what is possible. It does not change what a site is worth, and it does not create a buyer.

For the overwhelming majority of Singapore condominium owners this question does not arise. If your development has a management corporation (MCST), your unit carries a share value, and you vote at general meetings on that basis, you are in the strata regime — and the consent thresholds, including the new 70% and 65% bands for older buildings, apply to you in the normal way.

The non-strata developments discussed here are a small and specific set, mostly older, where the ownership structure separates the flats from the land. Owners in those buildings tend to know it, because it shapes everything from financing to conveyancing.

If you genuinely are not sure, the answer is on your title documents, and a conveyancing lawyer can tell you in minutes. It is not something to determine from a news article — including this one.

The substance of the change — that non-strata private residential developments currently require unanimous agreement between flat owners and landowners, that the Bill would allow majority-consent sale with safeguards for the landowner, the treatment of leases of at least 850 years as rendering the landowner's interest nominal and deemed transferred without consideration on a collective sale order, the extension to leases under 850 years, the five named developments, and the November 2025 Neptune Court Owners' Association letter and Ministry of Law review — comes from the reporting of The Straits Times and CNA, linked below. Those are the reporters' facts, attributed rather than claimed as ours.

What is ours is the lookup: for each named development, the completion year, unit count, recorded tenure and district we hold in our own directory of private non-landed developments.

The caveats are stated in full in the reality-check section above, and they are not decorative — in particular, our development-level tenure record is not the flat-level lease length the Bill turns on, and we hold no record at all for Paterson Court.

The news:

• The Straits Times — Ageing properties may get better shot at en bloc sales with proposed lowering of consent thresholds, 4 August 2026, which names the five developments and reports the November 2025 letter and review.
• CNA — New law proposed to lower en bloc thresholds for older condominiums, 4 August 2026, on the non-strata limb and the 850-year lease treatment.

The data:

• PropKaki's directory of Singapore private non-landed developments — completion year, unit count, recorded tenure and district for each named development.

This is commentary by the PropKaki Editorial Desk on reporting by The Straits Times and CNA. The account of what was tabled belongs to those newsrooms; the lookups, the framing and the opinions are ours.

It is opinion and general information, not legal, financial or property advice. The ownership structures discussed here are unusual and technical, and the difference between a strata and a non-strata development changes almost every legal question that follows. Anyone whose position turns on lease length, landowner interests or which regime applies to their building should work from their own title documents and take proper legal advice. A Bill introduced in Parliament is also not final.

Published 12 August 2026.