Updated - Singapore Million Dollar Public Homes - 2024 Analysis Update
This article was first posted on Medium here on Feb 2, 2024. This article has been updated with the latest data to be publish here. Interactive charts are added to allow my audience to better engage and understand the data that I was looking at. I decided to create simpler geospatial animation maps through Matplotlib to show the spatial dispersions of these million dollar public resale homes.
# Recap
In Oct 2022, I analysed 20 years of Singapore public housing data, and found an increasing trend of million dollar public homes sold from 2012 to 2022. And these million dollar public home sales were slowly occurring beyond the central residential areas of Singapore to certain outskirt residential areas. Metaphorically, I described this situation like a virus spreading from the city centre to the outskirts. While there have been several government property cooling measures (here and here) since then, the Singapore public housing market seems to still be red hot, with many new million dollar public home transactions happening even in 2024. Hence, I want to update my analysis to see how the situation is now.
# Update on million dollar homes
I updated my chart to show the million dollar public home transactions per month, and included the dates of some important events that would strongly impact Singapore's public housing market.
The three property cooling measures taken by the Singapore government in Sep 2022, Feb 2023 and Apr 2023 did lead to some drop in million dollar transactions in the following month. At the time of this update, we are still halfway into August 2024, while achieving an all-time-high of 120 million dollar public resale home transcations in July 2024.
# Percentage of million dollar public homes
I also updated the view on per month million dollar transactions as a percentage of overall public housing transactions This is because the increase in million dollar transactions could be from a proportionate increase in overall public housing transactions. The bar chart below shows the number of monthly public resale home transactions, while the line chart shows the percentage of public home transactions that were a million Singapore dollars or more.
From the charts above, we see the general increase in percentage of million dollar public home transactions over total public home transactions starting from Dec 2019. In fact, each month since Dec 2021 had roughly at least 1% or more ( only April 2023 had 0.97% ) of public home transactions that were million dollar homes! This percentage also hit its historical high in Jan 2024, at 2.95%. During pre-covid times, million dollar public home transactions were barely above 0.5% of overall public home transactions.
# Spread of million dollar public homes
Next, we look at the distribution of million dollar public transactions below.
We see that all regions with million dollar transactions in 2022 had even more million dollar transactions in 2023 ( except Bishan ). Bukit Panjang also had their first million dollar transaction in 2023. It seems like the “million dollar home virus” has continued its spread in 2023.
# Geospatial Distributions of million dollar public homes
I also wanted to plot the spatial distributions of these million dollar public
homes, spanning from 2012 to 2024, August. The darker regions have more
million dollar public home transactions, and the location of each million dollar transaction is plotted using
location data from OneMap, extracted to my best ability. This map layer used is the
2019 URA Master Plan
, and is taken from data.gov.sg.
To make the differences more clear, I am also the map layers of 2015 and 2024
( updated to August ).
For the entire 2015, we only saw million dollar public homes in the south of Singapore
Even though this map only has data until August 2024, we see continually more
million dollar homes spreading into north, east and west regions of Singapore.
Visually, the heat maps paint a very stark picture on the spread of million dollar public homes across Singapore in the past few years.
# Some ideas
Despite several government property cooling measures, we continue to see a rising number of million dollar public home transactions across different parts of Singapore.
That said, I am not concluding that the Singapore property market is now unaffordable. Calculating housing affordability requires more work than I can commit to. Nonetheless, just like how our media likes to continually report on million dollar public home transactions, I feel million dollar public homes create a psychologically intimidating anchor for many Singaporeans.
This said, many factors could suggest why million dollar public homes are becoming so common:
-- The demand for public housing in Singapore remains high, from young families buying their first homes to families downgrading from private homes.
-- There was a public housing supply crunch in Singapore that started during the Covid-19 period, and the public housing supply is only starting to ramp up.
-- The quality of Singapore public housing remains high, and families are willing to upwards of a million Singapore dollars for some of them due to their good location and their previous owners keeping the homes in good condition.
-- The booming Singapore private housing market is causing previous potential upgraders to stay on or look at public housing instead. -- Home sellers tend to anchor their expected sale prices to recent neighbouring public home transactions, and there were similar public homes around their region that were sold for a million dollars, these home sellers will be less willing to accept a lower offer.
# Conclusion
Although the numbers suggest that million dollar public homes are becoming more common in Singapore, even at its peak, only around 4% of public homes transacted in a month are a million dollars or more. While there many fascination about million dollar public homes, from the windfall for home sellers to exorbitantly high price for home buyers, I am interested to see how this trend continues, and to see if the Singapore government will implement more measures to tackle this situation.
Tags: Public Housing | Million Dollar |