Public housing remains affordable and attainable, says HDB, citing international studies
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Two international reports cited by HDB highlighted high levels of home ownership in Singapore.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Follow topic:
SINGAPORE – Public housing here remains affordable and attainable for Singaporeans, the Housing Board said on Oct 2, citing two international housing reports that pointed to high levels of home ownership and public housing attainability in Singapore.
Flash data released by HDB on Oct 1 showed resale prices had climbed 2.5 per cent from July to September
In its statement on Oct 2, HDB said resale flats that sold for high prices formed a small proportion of such transactions.
It said million-dollar flats accounted for only 2 per cent of total resale transactions in the last 1½ years, pointing out that these flats were mostly maisonettes, executive apartments and jumbo flats, or five-room flats with attractive attributes, such as good locations.
It also said that less than 0.5 per cent of four-room and smaller flats changed hands for above a million dollars.
“For the vast majority of home buyers, resale flats remain affordable. In 2023, eight in 10 first-timer families who bought resale flats were able to service their loan instalments using their monthly CPF contributions, with little or no cash payments,” said HDB.
Analysts had said on Oct 1 that 328 million-dollar flats were sold in the third quarter of 2024. There were 747 flats that sold for a million dollars or more in the first nine months of 2024, surpassing the 469 such units sold in the whole of 2023.
In its Oct 2 statement, HDB pointed to a study by research firm Demographia. It ranked Singapore 11th out of 94 housing markets across eight economies for housing affordability in 2023, up from 47th place in the previous year.
The findings, which were released in June, placed the Singapore housing market in the “moderately unaffordable” category, alongside 14 other markets in the US, UK and Canada.
The study has five bands for its housing affordability ratings: “affordable”, “moderately unaffordable”, “seriously unaffordable”, “severely unaffordable”, and “impossibly unaffordable”.
None of the 94 major housing markets surveyed was placed in the “affordable” ratings band, 37 markets were in the “seriously unaffordable” group, while 31 were considered “severely unaffordable”.
The report by Demographia used a median price-to-income ratio to determine affordability in each of the housing markets it analysed. This ratio, also known as the median multiple, was obtained by dividing the median house price of a housing market by its median household income.
According to the study, Singapore’s median multiple was 3.8, down 1.5 points from its score of 5.3 in the 2023 report.
Demographia said Singapore’s median multiple improved after accounting for housing grants and subsidies for first-time home buyers.
This means housing in Singapore is more affordable than in cities like New York, London, Sydney and Hong Kong – where the median multiples ranged from 7.0 to 16.7 – but less affordable than housing in other cities like Pittsburgh, which was the most affordable market with a median multiple of 3.1.
Both reports cited by HDB highlighted high levels of home ownership in Singapore. The second study,
The ULI study considers home ownership to be affordable when the ratio of the median home price to median annual household income is below 5.
According to the report, which was released in May, the ratio in Singapore for HDB flats is 4.7.
HDB said: “The Government remains committed to ensuring that public housing remains affordable to Singaporeans, and that the property market stays in line with economic fundamentals.”
It urged home buyers to be prudent in their purchase decisions.
