Reflections on 26th July CNA article on Singapore Public Housing Market

An interesting article was reported on 26th July, 2024, and I particularly like to refer to this statement -

"Despite the high visibility of million-dollar transactions, they comprised only 3 per cent of the 14,420 HDB resale flats sold in the first half of 2024... "This highlights that while these transactions garner significant media and public attention, they form a minor segment of the overall resale market. "The majority of transactions took place at more affordable levels, showcasing the diverse price range within the HDB resale market," he said. HDB also noted that "the vast majority of resale flats were transacted at a much lower price and remained affordable"."

Here is what I found from my analysis here, with data from data.gov.sg.

Yes, currently million dollar public homes comprising around 3% of our HDB resale flats sold. 3% out of 100% seems small. However, 4 years ago, in 2020, this percentage was easily < 1%. I think this change reflects the unsettling feeling that many potential Singapore home buyers are feeling. Putting such a statement out like that may make more people distrust data even more, and cause more people to relate to the statement that data is just “lies, damn lies and statistics”.
I agree we focused too much on million dollar public homes, which is why I decided to do my own analysis. My analysis does suggest that the percentage of public resale homes in price categories for 0-300K and 300-500K public homes are shrinking quite a bit for the past 4 years, while the percentage of categories of 500-800K, 800-1mil, and million dollar public homes are getting larger and larger. Ie, more and more percentage of public resale flats sold in Singapore are costing more than half a million. This is what my chart is saying , based on the data provided by HDB.
Affordability is a very strong word. I hope people understand that when I share what I share, I am talking about price, and price only, because affordability is a very loaded word that requires a lot more analysis on things like median income, inflation rates, interest rates, and so on. I dare not say my analysis remotely touches anything related to the affordability of our public homes.

As I said in my in-person sharing in July 2024, I am just a concerned Singapore citizen that learned a bit of analytics, and realised I could do my part to share a more diverse, and hopefully neutral narrative about our Singapore public housing market. Sorry for the cliche “influencer-ish” statement, but if any of you are interested in this Singapore public housing market like I am, feel free to follow me on Linkedin or maybe just bookmark my dashboard or something. I promise to continually monitor the Singapore public housing market as long as the data is available, and add more features / analysis when I can.

Tags: Public Housing | News |