What I found analysing 20 years of Singapore public housing data in 2022
Singapore’s public housing is internationally renowned for providing affordable housing to its citizens. Complementing its top-down urban planning approach, many academicians attribute Singapore’s effective public housing policies as a key driver to the city-state’s meteoric rise to first-world status since the 1980s.
However, this narrative has started to change among Singaporeans since the start of the pandemic in late 2019. As of September 2022, public housing prices in Singapore have increased for 27 straight months while seeing record number of million-dollar public housing transactions. And on 29th September 2022, the Singapore government announced a new set of cooling measures targeted to keep public housing prices affordable. So, is Singapore’s public housing prices spiralling out of control?
Housing has always been a very dear topic to me. I did a minor in Urban Studies at NUS, and wrote my Master’s thesis investigating the impact of the NEL subway line in Singapore on neighbouring public housing prices. In this post, I will use publicly available public housing resale data to explore the price trends in our Singapore public housing market.
Rising number of Million Dollar Singapore Public Home Transactions
Singaporeans seem to have a strong fixation on million dollar public homes, with many pointing to the rising number of million dollar public home sales in Singapore as an indicator of an unaffordable public housing market. Figure 1 tries to capture this by showing the number of million dollar HDB resale transactions since 2012, where Singapore had our first million dollar public housing sale. Interestingly, the scary climb of million dollar public home sales began from June 2020, and if we subtract 27 months from September 2022 (taking reference to the 27 straight months of rising public housing prices), we are back to June 2020!
Some might question, “Can the rising number of million dollar homes really indicate that the whole Singapore public housing market is rising in general too? What if these are just outliers from a small group of rich people?” While I have no scientific / statistical justification for the above statement, potential home sellers commonly anchor their asking prices on recent neighbouring housing transaction prices. These newsworthy million dollar public home sales could anchor home sellers to set higher asking prices, even if these prices were not a million dollars or more. If so, this could push the overall public housing prices in Singapore.
A more data centric way of looking at this is to look at the percentage of million dollar public home sales versus the overall public home sales.
Percentage of million dollar public home sales versus overall public home sales
Looking at the percentage of million dollar public home sales over overall public home sales, we can see that since February 2021, the percentage of million dollar public home sales made up around 1 per cent or more of the overall public home sales. This is notably higher than the percentages in previous months, which were mostly around 0.5 per cent or less. While this rise in percentage may seem small, moving from less than 0.5 per cent to more than 1 per cent actually a 100 per cent increase in absolute numbers. Although if it is of any consolation, the highest percentage of million dollar public home sales in any particular month is still less than 2 percent of overall public home sales of that month.
Public Housing Prices by regions, by year
Another view that I wanted was where these million dollar homes are located. For this, I grouped the million dollar homes together by their region and year. Note that the year 2022 numbers are from January to September.
Firstly, we can see that both 2021 and 2022 had a surprising number of million dollar transactions, at 259 and 277 respectively, and both years add up to contribute to 64% (536 / 838) of all historical million dollar public home sales in Singapore!
Secondly, we see that in 2021, there was a spike in the number of million dollar public home sales in the traditional affluent regions. However, in 2022, this trend not only carried on in the traditionally affluent regions, we also start to see other regions having their first million dollar home sales in 2022. Hence, I cannot deny that million dollar homes are feeling like a ‘disease’ that not only got worse in certain regions, but they also started to spread to other regions in Singapore as well in 2022.
Box Plot of Singapore Public Housing Prices since 2000, by year
To look beyond million dollar public home prices, I created a box plot visualisation to show public home transaction prices as a distribution across its maximum, minimum, quantile and median prices of each year (instead of months). In particular, I am taking data from 2000 onwards since I don’t need to fixate on million dollar public home transactions only.
I love box plots because they give quick ideas on a few properties of the data. Firstly, median is a better representation than averages for our use case because median can help mitigate the effects of extremely high public home prices. Secondly, box plots can visually show the distribution of housing prices for each of the years selected.
From the box plot, we can easily see that in 2022 (from Jan-Sep), our minimum, median and maximum prices are SGD200K, SGD 520K and SGD1.418 million respectively. Not only does the year 2022 have the highest median housing prices since 2000, we can also see the widening of public housing prices between the maximum and minimum prices. While this means that there were public houses sold below SGD520K in 2022, with the cheapest public housing sold in 2022 to be at only SGD 200K, the overall trend does indicate a strong rise in public housing prices in Singapore.
Final thoughts
In summary, no matter how I slice the data, the data suggests that the Singapore public housing market that has been steadily rising in the past few years (at least since 2019). And my current analysis only shows some basic exploratory analysis on the publicly available Singapore public housing transaction data. My tables and visualisations only share a specific view of the Singapore public housing market, and there are many factors that I did not dive into due to the lack of time.
Other areas of investigation or points of views could include:
- Rising quality of public housing quality in Singapore leading to higher prices
- Rising overall affluence of Singaporeans causing public housing prices to rise in tandem. Investigating the true affordability of Singapore’s public housing requires the study of changing income levels among Singaporeans as well
- Understanding factors leading to a million dollars public homes in Singapore, such as size of the flat, which floor the flat is located, location (which we investigated briefly) and housing type (even among public housing in Singapore, there are quite a few types), just to name a few.
- Macroeconomic conditions beyond Singapore, such as pandemic restrictions causing disruptions in Singapore’s housing supply or influx of external hot capital into Singapore’s housing market.
However, these topics would warrant much deeper research to do them justice, so I will just leave these as thinking points here. Hopefully my quick data showcase helps give everyone new interesting perspectives on our ever-exciting and ever-sensitive Singapore public housing market.
Lastly, I just want to add that compared to other major cities in the world, our public housing prices are still way more affordable. I sincerely hope that we can continue to keep up the good work of our forefathers, and continue to make Singapore a great city to live, work and play.
Reference
The data source I used — https://data.gov.sg/dataset/resale-flat-prices
