PUBLIC housing in Singapore was rated by two international housing reports as highly attainable and remains affordable, said the Housing and Development Board (HDB) on Wednesday (Oct 2).
This comes despite the latest flash data showing public housing resale prices accelerated in Q3 2024, up 2.5 per cent on robust demand amid still-tight supply conditions. Average prices of resale flats rose 2.9 per cent to S$629,856.
In 2023, Singapore was ranked 11th among the 94 major housing markets for affordability, up from 47th place the year before, based on the Demographia International Housing Affordability report.
It highlighted that public housing flats continue to remain affordable, and Singapore’s home ownership rate was close to 90 per cent – the highest among the markets it tracks.
Demographia rated middle-income housing affordability in 94 major housing markets in eight nations: Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and US.
The reported headline median multiple – a measure of home price to income ratio – for resale HDB flats was 3.8, down from last year’s score of 5.3. This improvement came amid housing grants and subsidies for first-time homebuyers, stated the report.
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Meanwhile, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) ranked Singapore’s public housing as the most attainable across 48 cities in 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Some of the countries analysed in its 2024 Asia-Pacific Home Attainability Index report include Australia, Indonesia, India and Japan.
The report also noted that the median price of HDB flats was 4.7 times that of median household income.
ULI said home ownership is considered affordable when the ratio of the median home price to median annual household income is below five.
Comparatively, the ratio of median home prices relative to median annual household income ranges from 25 to 32 times in other cities such as Beijing, Manila and Shenzhen.
HDB on Wednesday said the resale market remains “largely within reach of buyers”, and flats with very high resale prices form a “very small proportion” of all resale transactions.
“In the last 1.5 years, million-dollar flats accounted for only 2 per cent of total resale transactions,” said HDB. “Among resale transactions of four-room and smaller flats, less than 0.5 per cent were transacted above a million dollars.”
A record number of million-dollar transactions were chalked up in Q3 with 328 deals, up from 236 in Q2 and 128 in Q1, the latest flash data showed.
In the first nine months of the year, 747 flats cumulatively changed hands over the million-dollar threshold. In comparison, just 469 of such sales were done in the whole of 2023.
Analysts expect the numbers to continue rising steadily, with some projecting million-dollar flat sales to likely exceed 1,000 this year.
