A “Huttoning” Experience at the Huttons Annual Convention

Minister Desmond Lee with the Huttons Asia management and award winners. (Image: MND)

Mar 2021 - 3 min read

On 5 February 2021, Mr Desmond Lee, Minister for National Development and Minister-in-charge of Social Service Integration, graced the Huttons Annual Convention, at which he shared the latest updates on the Real Estate Industry Transformation Map (ITM) property transactions initiatives.

One of the key Real Estate ITM initiatives was the development of standard contract templates for the rental, sale and purchase of residential properties to facilitate digital contracts, as well as helpful checklists to support digitalised end-to-end property transactions.

The templates and checklists, which can be accessed by both salespersons and consumers at the Council for Estate Agencies (CEA) website, have seen 56,000 downloads in the past two years.

He also shared that the government has made property-related government data available through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to facilitate due diligence checks.

He added that in the coming year, CEA would be building on the Transaction Records Initiative, which was launched in 2019, and display not only HDB flat resale transactions but also HDB flat rental and private residential resale and rental transactions that were facilitated by real estate professionals to help estate agents (EAs) and salespersons showcase their experience and trustworthiness.

New Digital Solutions

At the virtual event, Minister Lee introduced new pre-approved digital solutions for the real estate agency industry as part of the SMEs Go Digital programme. Through this programme, EAs can receive up to 80% of funding support to take up the digital solutions for managing documents, conducting due diligence checks, and submitting transaction records.

The first sector-specific solution, Redoc by Real Estate Doc, is a cloud-based document management solution that allows EAs to create property contracts, digitally sign contracts through video conferencing, and upload, track and retrieve past transactions. 

Minister Lee commended Huttons Asia on its swiftness in adapting to the challenges brought about by the pandemic. In addition to a host of IT initiatives to aid its salespersons in working more efficiently, such as enabling online submissions of projects, enhancing its property calculators, and revamping the Huttons iPortal App for easy navigation, Huttons Asia was also one of the early adopters of the Guide on Best Practices for Consumer Ratings of Property Agents, which was launched by CEA last October.

Acknowledging the challenging year that had just passed, Minister Lee urged Huttons Asia to continue building on its efforts to raise professionalism, and inspire greater consumer confidence and trust in the years ahead. 

Information accurate as at 3 March 2021