HDB explained: how Singapore's public housing system actually works

The Housing & Development Board was formed in 1960 to clear a housing shortage. It is now the landlord, developer and market regulator for the housing most of the country lives in, and the reason a conversation about Singapore property is usually a conversation about one statutory board.

Two ways in, priced differently

A household can buy a new flat from the board or an existing one from its current owner, and the two routes behave nothing alike.

New flats are sold under the build-to-order system. The board announces a project, takes applications, and builds if demand justifies it. Successful applicants are chosen by ballot, and completion typically takes several years. The price is set by the board, with grants applied against it according to household income and circumstances.

Resale flats are sold by their owners, at whatever a buyer will pay. There is a valuation step, and the transacted prices are published, which is why the resale market, unlike the new-flat queue, can be charted. The medians on this site come from that record: every transaction, aggregated by month, by town and by flat type.

What is actually being bought

Not the land. A flat is a 99-year lease, and the clock starts when the lease commences rather than when a particular owner moves in. A flat resold at year forty carries what remains of the term, and that remainder is part of what the buyer is pricing, along with how much of it can be paid for out of retirement savings, which is restricted as the remaining lease shortens.

The conditions attached

Subsidised housing comes with rules that shape the market as much as the prices do.

• Eligibility runs on citizenship, on forming a qualifying household, and on income ceilings that differ by flat type and scheme.
• A minimum occupation period, generally five years, must be served before a flat can be sold on the open market.
• The Ethnic Integration Policy caps the share of any one ethnic group within a block and a neighbourhood, which constrains who a seller may sell to and is a real factor in how quickly a particular flat moves.

Each of these is a lever, and each has been adjusted repeatedly. The board restructured how new projects are classified in the mid-2020s, moving from a mature and non-mature split to a framework that attaches different conditions to different locations. The direction of that change, pricing location through conditions rather than through price alone, is the part that matters for reading the resale figures.

Why the medians move the way they do

Resale prices respond to the supply of new flats with a lag of years, because a build-to-order launch does not become a resale flat until its occupation period has run. A construction delay therefore lands on the resale market long after the delay itself, which is why the series charted here rises through periods when new supply was interrupted.

For eligibility, current grant amounts and the rules as they stand, the board is the source of record.