SINGAPORE - Fewer Housing Board resale flats were sold in September compared with the previous month as prices continue to fall.

In all, 1,875 such flats changed hands, a 4.9 per cent fall from the figure in August, real estate portal SRX Property said on Thursday (Oct 3) when releasing its preliminary figures.

Compared with a year ago, last month's decline was 6.3 per cent.

Four-room flats made up 39.6 per cent of the units sold last month. Five-room flats were at 24.9 per cent and three-room flats were at 25.7 per cent, while executive flats made up 7.6 per cent.

Resale flat prices dipped 0.2 per cent last month over August figures, but were up 0.1 per cent from the figures a year ago.

Overall resale flat prices for the third quarter of this year fell 0.1 per cent compared with the preceding quarter, continuing the downward trend since the beginning of 2019.

Compared with the peak in April 2013, the price decline was 14.1 per cent.

Prices in non-mature estates rose 0.9 per cent year on year, while those in mature estates fell 1.2 per cent.

A four-room unit at The Pinnacle @ Duxton was sold at the top price of $1 million last month. A 34-year-old executive maisonette unit at Bishan was also sold for the same price.

SRX forecasts that in the next three months, 2,107 flats will enter the HDB resale market as they approach their five-year minimum occupation period.

Its calculations show that people are not likely to pay more than the estimated market value for flats. Its data shows that the overall median transaction over X-value (TOX) was negative $2,000 last month.

The median TOX measures whether people are overpaying (in the case of a positive TOX) or underpaying (when it is a negative TOX) relative to the SRX Property X-value estimated market value for flats.

HDB executive flats recorded a negative median TOX of $6,000 last month, while three-room and four-room flats recorded negative median TOX values of $2,500 and $1,000 respectively.

Five-room flats recorded a positive median TOX of $1,000.

Flats in Bukit Panjang recorded the highest median TOX, at positive $8,000, while those in Ang Mo Kio recorded the lowest median TOX, at negative $11,500.

OrangeTee & Tie's head of research and consultancy Christine Sun said that the drop in sales volume from August to September was a seasonal decline as the number of transactions had similarly dipped in September for the past three years.

On the increase in resale flat prices in non-mature estates, she noted that these flats are able to command good prices given their longer remaining leases and newer product designs.

"More than 15,000 resale flats have been sold in the first eight months of this year," she said. "We estimate that between 22,000 and 24,000 resale transactions may be inked this year."

"We may expect overall prices to remain flat for the rest of the year, trending between 0 to minus 1 per cent for the whole of this year," she added.