Negotiating with brokers on rental prices

[aargon]

generally, how much negotiation do you do when determining or making an offer on a place for rent?

I see on the property section here, there are those who are listed as "make an offer" vs those with a set price. For those with set prices, would you still negotiate, and generally by how much? For those that mention make an offer, how much would you consider as offering? say its $5K per month based on what you see for similar properties listed, would you go as low as $3k as an offer? or would that be insulting?

I realise its all dependant on the broker and yourself, but curious to hear any stories people would like to share.

Thanks

[AndyD]

A 2K drop is too much on that budget... From my experience a few months back you could knock 10% off asking price, by starting at 20% and meeting at 10% - but that’s only ball parks obviously and can differ wildly...

[ProvenPracticalFlexible]

It really depends whether the original asking price is reasonable for the place or if they're asking unrealistic rentals. Some landlords are realistic, which means not much place for negotiation. Some think them boom times with thousands of expats flying in is still going on. So it's something from 0 to 20%. The tricky part is that you should do you home work what is a fair price for the place. At the moment the adds really seem to have a lot unrealistic asking prices, and not what is actually signed. Especially considering that the number of expats arriving is going down.

Good starting place is to look at the last statistics of rentals in the same condo you are looking for from:
http://www.ura.gov.sg/real_estate/main.jsp
There you can find the lower 25%, Median and higher 75% prices per sqft

For houses it's a bit more tricky, as there's no combined statistics available. You'd have to rely on agents views.

[drakka]

refer to www.ura.gov.sg.

Go search property market for rental

they have a section on market rental rates for each projects.

If you can get anything in the lowest 25th percentile or thereabouts, you've got a good deal