Singapore's public housing policies are internationally acclaimed, with many attributing our economic miracle to our public housing policies. However, as Singapore marches on form the effects of COVID-19, there has been more discussions the rising public homes in Singapore. Since the public home resale data set available to public, I wanted to let the data speak for itself ( Kudos to the work of our Singapore's, data.gov.sg and our Housing Development Board ( HDB ) for releasing the data to the public ). Hence, I created some dashboards to track some interesting trends of our public housing market. These few charts were created by me, based on what I feel I want to understand about our Singapore public housing market of the recent past and near future. This website is best viewed on desktop, as this will be the best way to view the charts below.
Want to search for specific public housing resale transactions in the past 6 months? Head to my other dashboard instead!
Instead of focusing on a single metric like median or mean prices, I wanted to see the distribution of public resale prices across months and quarters. Boxplot charts do this well because they show median prices, 25th and 75th percentile, and any outliers within that group. Periods where the median public home prices are greater than 500K SGD are shown in red, and we can see that this reflects all recent periods. Our boxplots also show that the separation between the expensive and cheap public homes have increased in the past few years. Do we still have affordable public homes? Yes. But are some of our public homes getting more and more expensive? That seems to be yes too.
Note: Don't see an interesting transaction? While doing my charts, I realised a particular SGD 1.73 million transaction that has been reported in different media outlets, but which doesn't seem to exist in this data set. As of 5th August 2024, I am still checking with HDB about this.
I also overlapped a bar and line chart that tracks total number of million public dollar homes and the percentage of million dollar public homes over total public homes sold. Not only we see a rising number of million dollar public homes sold Singapore, there is also a growing trend of these million dollar homes forming a larger percentage of overall public homes sold in Singapore. As recent as 2020, million dollar public homes only make up less than 1% of all public homes sold, and now, this percentage can easily be above 2-3% in any given period. That said, this percentage is still relatively small, but the growing trend can be a bit worrying for some.
This stacked bar chart shows the number of public home sales, grouped by price categories determined by me. I did these price categories using my own intuitions on what makes sense. I wanted this view to go beyond looking at million dollar homes, and focus on the overall market structure of our public housing market. We see growing number of public home sales that are in the range of SGD 500-800k, SGD 800K-1M and SGD less than 1M. There is also a shrinking number of public homes sold between SGD 300-500K, and barely any public homes sold that are less than 300K in recent months.
This chart is similar to the one above, but looks at percentages instead. This is to allow changes in proportions across different price categories even more obvious. We can see that expensive public home sales are forming a larger proportion of sales in the resale market. Similar to the trend caught above, the percentage of greater than 1 million dollar public homes is still quite small, but the growing trend does seem a bit worrying. And similar to above, we see growing number of public home sales that are 500K SGD and above, and a declining proportion that are less than 500K SGD.