How these figures are built

Everything on this site comes from data the Government publishes openly. Nothing is bought, nothing is scraped from a rival, and where a number has had to be worked out rather than read, this page says so and shows the working.

Where the data comes from

Government datasets are used under the Singapore Open Data Licence, which permits commercial use with attribution. Daily Study SG is an independent site and is not affiliated with the Housing Board, Iras, NEA or any government agency.

Medians, not averages

Every headline figure is a median. Resale prices lean upwards everywhere in Singapore, so one unusually large sale pulls an average towards a number that describes none of the flats in a block. The count of sales is printed beside each figure, because a median over two sales is a fact about a block rather than a market rate, and a reader deciding what to offer should be able to tell the two apart.

District and town figures are medians of block medians, not medians of transactions. A district made up of many small blocks is therefore not dragged by one large one. Both approaches are defensible; this site uses the first and says so.

Price per square foot is converted

The Housing Board publishes floor area in square metres. The market quotes psf. Every psf figure here is converted at 10.7639 sq ft to the square metre, and is therefore a derivation of the published figure rather than the published figure itself.

Postal codes are worked out, not published

HDB identifies a flat by block number and street. It publishes no postal code, so the codes on this site are derived: a Singapore HDB postal code is a three-digit sector prefix followed by the block number padded to three digits, so Block 117 Aljunied Ave 2 is 380117 and Block 14 Haig Road is 430014.

The rule was tested rather than assumed. Against the 6,019 addresses in the food establishment register that are known HDB blocks, it holds 6,012 times — 99.9 per cent. Measured across all addresses, private property included, it holds only 39.8 per cent, because private developments do not follow the convention. It is an HDB-only rule and is applied only to HDB blocks.

It does not work for blocks with a letter in the number. Across 617 such blocks the rule holds just 37 per cent of the time: River Valley Road runs 3A to 179020, 3B to 179021 and 3C to 179022, which has nothing to do with the number three. An early version of this site stripped the letter and put Blocks 1A, 1B, 1C and 1E Cantonment Road — four separate towers with four different median prices — on the same code. Rather than risk that, lettered blocks are given no postal code at all unless one has been observed directly. That is why 2,673 of the 9,767 blocks here show no code. They keep every one of their prices.

Districts

Postal districts D01 to D28 are fixed groupings of two-digit postal sectors, so a district follows from a postal code with no further guesswork. If the code is right, the district is right. Sector 74 belongs to no district and is left blank rather than pushed into a neighbour.

The lease, and the cost per month

Lease position is worked out from the year the lease commenced, which HDB publishes, on the basis that every HDB flat is a 99-year lease. It is deliberately not taken from the remaining lease recorded against a sale: that figure describes the lease on the day of that sale, so a 2017 transaction reports nine more years than the flat has today, and using it would overstate every older block.

The cost per month divides everything a buyer will ever pay — the price, both stamp duties, legal and valuation fees, the whole of the mortgage interest, and running costs for as long as the lease lasts — by the months of lease remaining. It excludes four things, each of which would move the answer: future money is not discounted, so a dollar paid in 2079 counts the same as one paid today; there is no opportunity cost on the deposit; CPF accrued interest, which must be restored on sale, is not modelled; and no resale value is assumed, because the figure describes the cost of using a lease to its end rather than of selling part-way through.

Stamp duty rates

Rates are stored with the date each took effect rather than written into the arithmetic, and the older schedules are kept so a past purchase can be checked against the rules that applied to it. ABSD has been revised 5 times since 2013 and on two occasions a rate doubled; a calculator with the figures baked in would be wrong the week after a Budget, and wrong quietly, because the sums would still run. The calculator names the schedule it used.

What this site cannot tell you

• Whether to buy, or what to offer. It applies published rates to figures you supply and shows its working. It does not know your circumstances.
• What a bank will lend you. The loan-to-value cap, the Total Debt Servicing Ratio, the Mortgage Servicing Ratio, CPF rules and the housing grants are not yet applied. Until they are, the loan percentage in the calculator is your assumption, not an approval.
• What any particular flat is worth. These are block medians. Within a block, floor, facing, renovation and condition move a price a long way, and only the first of those is in the data.
• Anything about private property. Everything here is HDB resale. Condo and landed transactions come from a different source and are not yet included.

Finding an error

If a figure here disagrees with the Housing Board, the Housing Board is right and this site is wrong. The published files each carry a SHA-256 checksum so the data behind a page can be checked against the data that was downloaded.