Singapore turned 55 in August 2020, and thanks to COVID-19, the nation had its first-ever mobile celebration. The inaugural National Day Rally was also postponed to September, so if you’re feeling nostalgic, here’s a #throwback to Singapore’s Real Estate History: Thriving Since The 60s.
Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat also gave Singapore’s fourth budget announcement of the year. With a central focus of the $33 billion supplementary Fortitude Budget being jobs, many of the existing grants and relief schemes were enhanced and/or extended to 2021 to stimulate the economy, which has been “deeply impacted by the global shocks”.
The Ministry of Trade and Industry downgraded Singapore’s GDP growth forecast to “-7% to -4%”, and based on preliminary estimates, the resident unemployment rate rose to 3.3% in March 2020.
Many industries like aviation and retail remain badly hit by the pandemic recession, but how about the housing sector? It may be too soon to tell, but here’s a roundup of the latest highlights and happenings in the property market in the past month.
HDB launched 7,800 new flats in August HDB BTO sales launch
In the public housing sector, HDB had its biggest BTO sales launch exercise to date. The August 2020 launch featured over 7,800 flats for sale across eight estates, all of which were oversubscribed in a matter of days. Read more about it here: 7,862 Units Across 8 Estates—What To Expect From HDB’s Largest BTO Launch To Date.
Missed the August BTO launch? Don’t fret – there’s still the November 2020 and February 2021 sales launches coming up.
In the HDB resale market, things seem to be picking up after quite a slow first half of the year. Although the HDB Resale Price Index increased marginally by 0.3% from the first quarter to 131.9 in Q2 2020, transaction volumes fell sharply during the same period. There were only 3,426 applications in the second quarter of 2020, which is a 45.4% year-on-year drop from 6,276 in Q2 2019. This is likely due to the record-low numbers during circuit breaker.
Thankfully, however, the market seems to be improving as July 2020 showed encouraging numbers. Let’s hope this will continue into the quarter.
Two New Condo Launches: Forett at Bukit Timah and NoMA at Guillemard Road
In the private housing sector, we saw some encouraging activity as well: Forett at Bukit Timah made its official launch, and managed to sell 30% of units at the weekend launch.
NoMA also opened its showflat for viewing last month. On the opening weekend, the developer offered an attractive 13% early bird discount to those purchasing their units on 29 August.
Data for August 2020 is not out yet, but looking at the past month’s numbers, private home sales went up by 8.2% in July 2020 in its second consecutive month-on-month increase.
PropertyGuru released its quarterly Property Market Index Report Q3 2020
In August, we also released our quarterly Property Market Index Report for the third quarter of the year. We observed a +2.15% increase in non-landed private property prices. There remains a supply glut in the market, and we saw a 46.39% increase in the number of property listings on PropertyGuru. This record-high increase was mostly driven by resale condo sellers hoping to sell their properties.
If you’re keen to understand more, you can download the full report, or read our insights on the property price and supply indices and the top performing districts and projects of the quarter.
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