Singapore's HDB resale market has shifted from broad-based price growth into a narrower, age-driven regime. Working from the latest reliable factor-model reading (September 2025, excluding the most recent noisy months), the Baseline Market is up just +1.6% year-on-year, while Log Building Age has added +4.9% over the same window — meaning the lease-decay penalty has eased materially even as headline quality-adjusted prices barely moved. The story this quarter is not about the market level; it's about which flats are being re-rated against it.
Over the three months from June to September 2025, the Baseline Market gained +0.4% — effectively unchanged after the strong 2021–2022 run that contributed most of the +24.6% cumulative move since dataset start. By contrast, Log Building Age added another +2.0% in the same three months, extending a cumulative move of +24.8%. In plain terms, older leasehold stock has been catching up to newer flats faster than the overall market has been advancing.
Room Density is the most volatile factor on the board: +3.5% over 12 months but −1.8% in the last three, a sharp reversal. Floor Deviation Squared added +0.5% in three months despite a −0.3% 12-month print, and Age Deviation Squared mirrored that pattern at +0.4% / −1.1%. These convex factors are picking up a re-pricing of "atypical" units — flats far from the median in floor area or building age — that the linear factors miss.
Three factors that often drive other cities' narratives have been near-silent in Singapore this year. Location Premium printed −0.4% over 12 months and +0.0% over three. Price Tier contributed −0.1% and −0.0% respectively. High Floor (15+) was a rounding error at +0.1% / −0.0%. The HDB market's policy structure continues to compress the kinds of geographic and tier dispersion that dominate private-market indices elsewhere.
| Factor | 12-month return | 3-month return | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline Market | +1.6% | +0.4% | Quality-adjusted market level — broadly flat after the 2021–22 run. |
| Log Building Age | +4.9% | +2.0% | Older leasehold stock re-rating upward; lease-decay penalty narrowing. |
| Room Density | +3.5% | −1.8% | Volatile; sharp 3-month reversal after a strong 12-month print. |
| Location Premium | −0.4% | +0.0% | Geographic dispersion essentially flat. |
| Age Deviation Squared | −1.1% | +0.4% | Convex age factor turned positive in the most recent quarter. |
| Non-linear Floor Area | −0.5% | +0.0% | Floor-area convexity quiet at the latest reading. |
| Price Tier | −0.1% | −0.0% | Tier dispersion negligible — typical for HDB. |
The chart below shows cumulative returns rebased to October 2018 = 0%. Baseline Market is omitted from this axis because its magnitude is roughly ten times larger than the other factors; treat Log Building Age and Room Density as the two factors actually doing work.
Interactive charts for every factor, updated monthly.
Open Singapore Factors →Methodology: per-month cross-sectional OLS of log(price/sqm) on property characteristics with a rolling 3-month window, applied to HDB resale transactions from data.gov.sg. The two most recent months are excluded from quoted figures. Full methodology →