Dear Mr. Tan,
The terminologies for apartment, condominium and serviced apartment has been distorted over the years. Traditionally, it is called apartment. However, when apartments were built with facilities such as swimming pools, gymnasium etc, people wanted to differentiate apartment as without facilities and condominiums are with facilities. Then developers built service apartments on commercial land with facilities and F&B and managed like a hotel by providing housekeeping services etc (without selling any units on strata basis). Lately many developers start to build apartments/condominiums on commercial land and use the names service apartments/condominiums/suites etc for marketing (but no services like housekeeping, room service, F&B etc are provided)which is misleading. What the developer's try to differentiate is that the apartments/condominiums are built on commercial land title. Most buyers do not know that properties on commercial land titles will attract higher quit rent, assessment charges and electricity, water and sewerage charges and thus higher monthly serviced/maintenance charges. No difference on other taxes such as income tax or real property gains tax.
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