Updated - Are Singapore public homes still cheap?
This article was first posted on Medium here on March 12, 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.
A few weeks ago, I updated my analysis on the rising number of million dollar public homes in Singapore in 2024. Not only did we continue to see a rise in Singapore million dollar public homes since 2012, these million dollar homes were continually spreading from the central areas of Singapore to her periphery regions. Monthly million dollar public home sales were starting to up to 1–2% of overall public home sales in Singapore, which is a stark rise from the less than 1% a few years ago.
Continuing with this analysis, I wanted to update with the latest data set (downloaded on 17th August, 2024) and go beyond million dollar public homes to better understand our overall Singapore public housing market. Maybe our public homes are still cheap, and these million dollar public homes are just a minority of outlier public home sales? They only make up at most 2+% of all public home sales in any given period, right?
# The Analysis
To refresh our memories, I previously plotted a box plot distribution of the public home prices from 2003 to present day. Public home prices were stable from 2003 to 2007, before its (1) steady increase in median prices, (2) increase in the number of positive outlier home prices and (3) an upwards shift of its price distribution from 2007 to 2013. The years 2013 to 2019 saw a period of relative stability, before a huge spike from 2019 to August 2024. The general trend seems to indicate an overall rise in public home prices in Singapore.
# Heat Maps
Next, I plot a heat map by regions (y-axis), years (x-axis) and regional median prices (cell) to see if I can identify any regional public home trends. The different accessibility and amenity provisions of different regions should impact their public home prices. The heat map shows that median public home prices rose across all regions in Singapore since 2003, with Bishan, Bukit Timah and Bukit Merah reaching median prices of 800K and above in recent years ( data is updated to August 2024 for this writing ).
Next, I created a similar heat map on median prices / square feet to account for any housing size effects, and we see similar price patterns across the regions across the years. This indicates the rising in median prices in recent years were regardless of size flats.
Lastly, I divide median prices / square feet by the flats' remaining lease to account for lease effects on prices. Public homes in Singapore have a 99-year lease when purchased from the government, and when the lease is up, these public homes theoretically have zero value. Hence, the lesser the remaining lease, in theory, the cheaper these homes should be.
In this updated heat map, we now see Central Area public homes having higher price ‘scores’ ( these data transformations can make their interpretations tricky ). In simpler terms, Central Areas public homes of the same size and same remaining lease will generally cost more than their counterparts in other areas. In short, Singaporeans are willing to pay a premium for “central” (accessible) public housing.
# The Central Million Dollar Question
My previous million dollar analysis found that the Central Area has the most million dollar public homes. Yet, the heat maps indicates that the Central Area doesn’t have a high median public home price "scores". To investigate this, I plot the box plot chart between the Central Area and Bishan ( an area with high median public home prices ).
This is where I found that the Central Area has two distinct public home price groups in recent years, while Bishan has a more normally distributed spread of public home sale prices. Each dot beside the box plots represent a public home sale. This group of million dollar and lower priced public homes caused the Central Area median home prices to be lower than the Bishan median prices. This could be due the mix of old and new public housing estates within the Central Area that causes these two price clusters to surface. In other words, our Central Area is not just all about expensive public homes after all! The existence of bimodal distributions ( histograms with two distinct peaks ) also reflects the weakness of using a single metric to identify or represent a region or country’s housing market trend. This was the key motivation for me creating my dashboard charts) to monitor our Singapore's public housing market through different angles.
# Public Home Price Groups
Beyond median and outlier home prices, I wanted to understand the proportion of public home prices by specific price groups. I am looking at just home prices, and not price per square feet or price per square feet of the remaining lease, because this would most directly show the financial burden of owning a public home in Singapore. I grouped the prices into the following: (1) <=300K (2) 300–500K, (3) 500–800K, (4) 800K-1m and (5) >1m.
Plotting a bar chart stacking public home sales by their price groups across the years, it shows the decline in public homes sold that are < SGD 300K, and a small rise in public home sales between SGD 500K-1 million dollars.
To study these changes more clearly, I plotted these price groups as a percentage of total quarterly public home sales. Shockingly, I found that in 2006, slightly more than 80% of public homes sold were < SGD 300K, and none were >SGD 500K ! Contrast this to 2023, where public home sales of < SGD 300K make up less than 2%, and > 60% of public homes sold are > SGD 500K.
So, if you are buying a public resale home in Singapore in 2024, there is a low chance you can get it at < SGD 300K. You still have a chance of getting a resale public home ranging from SGD 300–500K, but there are higher odds that you may be look at the price range of SGD 500–800K. The relatively good news is that public homes at > SGD 800K are still only 10% of total public resale homes sold in Singapore, even though this number has slowly been increasing in recent years, with overall public home resales remaining relatively constant. While we have to factor in inflation across the 17 years of this data set, and how it affects our public home prices, it is still interesting to see the extent of this price shift.
# Housing Price Groups by Housing Type
Lastly, I want to do a quick look at the same stacked bar chart across different flat types: (1) 5-Rooms, ECs and Multi-Gen flats together, (2) 4-Room flats, (3) 3-Room flats and (4) 2-Room flats.
Classifying 5-Room, ECs and Multi-Gen flats together, slightly more
than 50% of them were sold at
For 4-room public homes, more than 90% of them used to be sold at < SGD 300K in the early 2000s. By 2023, more than 60% of them are selling between SGD 500K to 800K. In fact, you cannot find any 4-room public homes that are sold at < SGD 300K from 2022.
For 3-room public homes, > 99% of them used to be sold at
For 2-room public homes, > 90% of them used to be sold at < SGD 300K in the early 2000s. However, since the early 2020s, this proportion has been shifting massively, to the point that in 2023, more than 70% of 2-room public homes are selling between SGD 300K to 500K.
# Concluding thoughts
Even in 2024, there are public homes that cost < SGD 300K, even though they are only now just 2-Room and 3-Room flats. 4-Room flats can still cost between SGD 300–500K, even though a larger proportion are between SGD 500–800K. Lastly, for the larger 5-Room, EC and Multi-Gen flats, only less than 1% of them can cost < SGD 500K.
Adding on from the rise in million dollar public homes in Singapore, this analysis shows that there are more proportion of Singapore public homes are sold at higher prices in 2024 than in the recent past. And while there are still pockets of cheaper public resale home, they are getting rarer.
There are many factors that affect general public housing prices, from new infrastructure projects, population growth, growth in median household incomes, changing interest rates to possible housing supply crunch due to COVID-19 restrictions. All these factors can contribute to the overall demand and supply of public homes in Singapore, which then in turn affects the overall prices of our public housing market.
While the data shows an increase in overall public home prices, I am not saying whether these are good or bad changes. Public homes downgraders should be happy that they can cash out their public home to boost their retirement funds. Some may argue these price shifts indicate that our strong economy and high quality public homes are continually fuelling their demand and boosting public housing prices. Naturally, public home-buyers may look at this analysis as a justification of a unsustainable red-hot Singapore public housing market that they have been priced out. However, an accurate public housing affordability study requires a lot more factors to be considered, and is beyond the scope of my current analysis.
This said, since 2023, the Singapore government has worked on a series of policy interventions and public home launches to cool down our public housing market. I will follow this development and update my analysis accordingly.
All in all, I hope my analysis has provided some simple but data-driven view of our Singapore public housing market. A huge caveat for this analysis is that my analysis and interpretations are very much an art rather than science. Nonetheless, I still hope that everyone who has read till here was able to take away something from this article.
Tags: Public Housing | Million Dollar |