How Singapore prices property, and how to read it

Singapore quotes property in dollars per square foot, splits sharply between public and private housing, and prices the remaining years on a lease as a first-class variable. Any figure that ignores those three facts will mislead, so IndexProp SG is built around them. This piece is the hub’s reading guide: which registers the figures come from, and the conventions that make a Singapore number legible to someone arriving from another market.

Where do the numbers come from?

Two registers, kept by two authorities, and they are never pooled. Public housing comes from HDB’s resale register, which records every approved resale with the price, the flat type, the storey range, the floor area and the remaining lease on one row. Private housing comes from URA’s records of sale caveats and lease contracts. The current build carries 987,909 HDB resales back to 1990, 24,659 of them in the last twelve months, alongside 131,793 private sale caveats, across 55 districts.

What is a caveat, and why does it matter?

A caveat is a legal notice a purchaser lodges against a title to protect an interest in it, usually shortly after exercising the option to purchase. That makes the private series fast but slightly different in kind from the public one: it records commitments rather than completed registrations, its dates sit earlier in the purchase, and the rare buyer who lodges no caveat is invisible to it. The licence difference follows the registers too. The resale records are open data; the private records may be republished only as statistics, which is why private figures anywhere on this network are distributions and medians rather than rows. What each licence actually permits is the fuller treatment.

Why does Singapore quote per square foot?

Two flats at the same price are different purchases if one is larger. Dividing the price actually paid by the floor area actually recorded puts every flat on one scale, and it is the scale the market itself uses. The national median is currently S$602 per square foot over 24,659 resales in the last twelve months. The reading rule that follows: never carry a headline rate to a specific flat type, because each type has its own median and the spread between them is the market’s structure rather than noise.

Why are public and private never pooled?

HDB flats and private condominiums differ in buyer eligibility, in tenure, in how they are financed, and in price per square foot by a wide margin that each area page states with its own count and window. IndexProp SG publishes both, side by side, and never averages them: a median across the two would describe neither. The same discipline that keeps three countries out of one league table keeps two registers out of one median.

Why does the remaining lease move the price?

Every HDB flat is a 99-year leasehold. As the tail shortens, CPF usage and bank financing both tighten, and the resale market prices that in decades before the lease runs out. Each area page therefore charts price by remaining-lease band, holding flat type fixed so the curve is a lease effect rather than a mix effect. When comparing two flats, compare them within a lease band before comparing them across one: a cheap rate on a short tail is not a bargain, it is a different asset.

Why is there a mix-adjusted rate as well?

Smaller and older flats carry a higher rate per square foot, so an area heavy in 3-room stock reads cheap on a raw blended rate and is not. Comparing two areas on the raw figure compares their stock composition as much as their prices. Every league table on IndexProp SG therefore ranks on each area’s own per-flat-type medians restated at the national flat-type stock mix, and withholds that figure where an area’s sales cover less than 60% of that national mix. Below the gate it is not published at all, and never falls back to the raw blended rate.

How current are the figures?

Unusually current, by the standards of achieved-price registers. HDB resales enter the public dataset within days of registration, and the caveat series records the purchase earlier still, at the commitment rather than the completion. The general rule that every register of achieved prices trails the market still applies, but Singapore’s lag is among the shortest anywhere, and every page on the market site states the month its own window closes.

Open IndexProp SG to read any district or neighbourhood. How this register compares in structure with the other two the network runs is set out in what IndexProp measures, market by market.