When my condo maintenance bill tripled: A cautionary tale for future condo buyers

The maintenance fees for Dairy Farm Residences are a "bit" higher than the original quote.
Quoted maintenance fees are only an estimate, I get that. But when the difference is off by 150 to 200 per cent, it makes you wonder if the buyers are just being milked, which is a bad but appropriate pun for this condo.
Allegedly, some people would be paying $720 a month for a two-bedder. That's insane.
$720 a month is the kind of maintenance I expect from an Orchard condo, with fewer units than the number of years it would take for HDB prices to reach $2 million. It's definitely not what I expect from a mass market District 23 condo.
All this has caused some buyers to object and start a petition, which is a much calmer response than I'd expect.
What's frustrating is that I see no real way for the buyers to have prevented this. How were they supposed to know it was going to happen? No amount of "research" or "doing their homework" would have revealed this.
That said, it's not like the management has not tried to do anything at all. Apparently, maintenance fees have now been reduced, but only to around $600+ per month. That's still not chump change. And I'd say it's a financial migraine for the people who sought rental assets here, because a maintenance fee that high is going to crush the net rental yield.
I don't even want to think about resale, because when future buyers see those maintenance fees… well, it's most certainly going to be a big dealbreaker, let's put it that way.
It's probably time for the authorities to consider some form of regulation here. I understand the routine argument that it's between the buyer and seller etc, and it is a private property… but it's not right that this kind of bait-and-switch can be used for property sales.
It's not the first time either
Parc Komo also saw a hike in maintenance fees, beyond the initial quoted amount; and the common factor between the two developments seems to be that it's a mixed-use development. One of our readers have told us that the response given was that the maintenance fee was based on an estimation at that point in time in 2018/19, and that because of reasons like the pandemic, war, and inflation (among others), that it has impacted operating costs.
This is something that needs at least a small amount of regulation. Otherwise, what's to stop someone from disguising $600-a-month maintenance fees as $200-a-month "estimates" to push sales in the future if there's no recourse for buyers here?
In any case, let me be clear that I don't think that developers were purposely trying to mislead buyers here. But if this has only happened to a select number of developments (and not all developments), it makes it harder for these buyers to swallow such reasons that were given.
Especially in mass market condos, the new maintenance fees that are being pushed today would have been the cause for serious push backs from buyers. I don't see many buyers agreeing to go ahead with such purchases, if they knew that maintenance fees were that high to begin with.
ALSO READ: 7 key points to consider before buying an old landed property in Singapore
This article was first published in Stackedhomes.