The CityDataLab factor model for Singapore's HDB resale market — built from a rolling cross-sectional regression on data.gov.sg transactions — shows a clear inflection through late 2025 and into early 2026. The Baseline Market, our quality-adjusted market-wide price level, fell 8.6% in the three months to February 2026, the sharpest quarterly contraction since the 2023 cooling-measures aftermath. Year-on-year, Baseline is down 2.1%, ending a multi-year run of cumulative gains that now sits at +77.0% since 2017.
The three monthly Baseline prints since November 2025 — −5.5%, −0.4%, −3.0% in log-return terms — represent the first sustained negative run in the post-2022 series. Importantly, this is not a composition effect: by construction, basket shifts are routed into Baseline only after factor returns have absorbed repricing. The recent moves are a genuine repricing of the quality-adjusted resale flat.
Beneath the headline, the hedonic factors tell a more nuanced story. Log Building Age returned +8.5% over the past twelve months and +3.1% over the past three — older blocks continue to reprice upward relative to younger stock, a pattern consistent with mature-estate scarcity and selective en-bloc speculation. Location Premium added +6.4% year-on-year and +2.2% over three months, indicating that spatial dispersion in pricing is still widening even as the average level falls.
On the other side, Price Tier — our factor capturing the within-town premium of higher-decile transactions — fell 5.2% year-on-year, suggesting compression at the top of the resale distribution. Room Density swung from a strongly positive 2024 to a mild −0.4% over the last year.
| Factor | 12-month return | 3-month return | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline Market | −2.1% | −8.6% | Quality-adjusted level has turned down |
| Log Building Age | +8.5% | +3.1% | Older blocks still repricing higher |
| Location Premium | +6.4% | +2.2% | Spatial dispersion widening |
| Price Tier | −5.2% | −0.3% | Top-decile premium compressing |
| Room Density | −0.4% | +2.3% | Recent rebound after a soft year |
| Construction Period | +0.1% | +0.0% | Build-era cohort effects flat |
The cumulative picture since 2017 frames the current move: Baseline Market is still up +77.0%, while Log Building Age has contributed +20.4% of compounding repricing. Location Premium remains cumulatively negative at −10.7% and Price Tier at −7.1%, meaning the long-run lift has been concentrated in the market-wide level rather than spatial or tier-based dispersion. The February 2026 reading is the first in over a year where the quality-adjusted level is doing the heavy lifting downward while age and location partly offset it.
As always, we exclude the two most recent observations from any forward-looking interpretation — the 3-month rolling regression hasn't fully absorbed them.
Interactive charts for every Singapore HDB factor, updated monthly.
Open Singapore Factors →Methodology: cross-sectional OLS of log(price/sqm) on hedonic characteristics over a rolling 3-month window of HDB resale transactions from data.gov.sg. Full specification at about.