Per square foot or per square metre? Singapore uses both, and they disagree by 10.76

Singapore is a metric country that buys property in imperial units. HDB records the floor area of every flat in square metres; every agent, every listing and every conversation quotes dollars per square foot. Both are on every page of this site for that reason, and the conversion between them is the single most common place a comparison goes wrong.

The number

One square metre is 10.7639 square feet. So a flat at $10,400 per square metre is $966 per square foot, and a flat at $966 per square foot is $10,400 per square metre. Dividing when you should multiply produces a figure about 116 times off, which is obvious; multiplying when you should divide produces a figure 10.76 times off, which in a market where PSF runs from roughly $400 to $1,500 can look almost plausible.

Why PSF won

Nothing principled. Property practice here inherited imperial units and never gave them up, while the statistical agencies stayed metric. The result is that the authoritative source and the working vocabulary use different units, and anyone comparing a government figure to an agent’s figure has to convert first.

What this site does

Leads with PSF, because that is what the market speaks, and prints the per-square-metre equivalent beside every headline so the two can be reconciled without arithmetic. The toggle in the tab header switches the whole page. The conversion happens once, on the raw transaction, before any median is taken: converting a median is not the same as taking the median of converted values when rounding is involved, and doing it in the wrong order is how two pages end up disagreeing by a dollar.