Five-Year Terms For Home Office Scheme

Source : The Straits Times, Apr 1, 2008

PROPERTY owners can now run businesses from home for five-year periods instead of the previous three-year terms.

The change, which kicked in today, was to ‘provide greater convenience to home office users’ and help them formulate longer-term business plans, said the Housing Board (HDB) and the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) yesterday.

The Home Office Scheme was launched in 2003 to encourage entrepreneurship by giving ‘private property and HDB home owners the flexibility to conduct small-scale business from their homes’, the two agencies said.

Applications are granted subject to certain conditions such as having low noise levels and not involving selling physical goods.

Since its introduction, about 21,000 applications have been approved, primarily for companies in IT consulting, Web design, advertising and real estate services. About 95 per cent of successful home office applications are for public housing.

For more information on the scheme, call the HDB service hotline on 1800-225-5432 or the URA’s customer hotline on 6223-4811. Applications and renewals cost $20 each.