After three years of ramped-up building, the Housing Board is tapering off its "massive construction programme" from next year, Minister for National Development Khaw Boon Wan said on Monday.

"We will do so in a measured way, to allow the market to gradually adjust, just like what we had done to cool the property market earlier," he added.

In a post on his blog, Housing Matters, Mr Khaw said that three years of higher supply had begun to restore balance in the housing market. One sign of this, he said, was lower cash-over-valuation figures in the resale market for Housing Board flats.

Another is the average application rate for Build-To-Order (BTO) flats, which fell from 5.3 in 2010 to a low of 2.9 this year.

His post came as the Housing Board's largest ever joint launch of 8,952 BTO and balance flats was drawing to a close. Mr Khaw noted that the November launch brought the BTO supply to over 25,000 in 2013, and over 77,000 in the last three years.