How million-dollar HDB flats became less rare

Singapore’s public housing marketplace looks like it is breaking character. Apartments that were meant to anchor affordability are clearing above seven figures with growing frequency, and the pace is no longer a novelty curve. Through the first half of 2025, million-dollar deals hit record territory, with July alone logging 169 transactions and about 6 to 7 per cent of that month’s resale volume. For the year to date, units at or above a million account for roughly one in twenty resale deals, a higher share than a year ago. The signal here is not just price inflation. It is the market structure asserting itself under new constraints.

The backdrop matters. HDB resale prices rose almost ten per cent in 2024, and the city saw a record 1,035 million-dollar transactions for the full year. That momentum carried into 2025, when the second quarter alone set a new record with 415 million-dollar resales, even as quarterly price growth moderated to 0.9 per cent. In other words, headline inflation in the index has slowed, but the upper tail keeps thickening. That combination tells you supply scarcity, not speculative froth, is doing the heavy lifting.

Look at the product design and you see why. The Prime Location Public Housing model doubled the minimum occupation period to ten years for prime sites and layered on stricter resale conditions. In October 2024, HDB replaced the old mature versus non-mature binary with a Standard, Plus, Prime framework that tightens eligibility and resale rules the closer a flat sits to transport nodes and city-core amenities. Those rules preserve affordability for first owners. They also constrain future circulation of central, high-amenity flats, which channels upgraders and dual-income buyers toward older, pre-framework stock that has laxer resale conditions. That redirection concentrates demand precisely where million-dollar pricing clears more easily.

Grants and borrowing caps nudge in the same direction. Enhanced support for first-time buyers increases purchasing power at the bottom and middle of the market, while lower loan-to-value limits for HDB loans and a more cautious credit posture temper leverage. The mix does not kill demand. It reshapes it. Buyers with stronger cash positions and family help lean into well-located resale stock because they can transact immediately and avoid BTO wait times, while others take longer to accumulate buffers. The policy stance spreads the queue but also lifts clearing prices for rare units that tick multiple boxes at once.

Underneath the policy layer sits an old scarcity story with a modern twist. The units that most often break a million are not generic four-room flats. They are large executive apartments and maisonettes with generous floor plates, very high-floor corner stacks with unobstructed views, and central projects with proven amenity stacks like Pinnacle at Duxton or the inner ring of Toa Payoh, Kallang Whampoa, and Bukit Merah. When these hit the market with long remaining leases, competition spikes. The record prints of the past year illustrate the point. A Margaret Drive flat hit about S$1.73 million in mid 2024, and executive and prime-location resales continued to reset benchmarks through 2025. These are not average units. They are the market’s limited editions.

Supply timing has been working against affordability too. Pandemic-era delays and a multi-year backlog kept many households in the resale lane. The government is now ramping up launches, including about 12,000 shorter-wait flats by 2027, but that relief is staggered. In the gap, households who value time-to-key and proximity to family or childcare are paying for immediacy, and the premium shows up most at the top end. Even as the index cools, the count of million-dollar deals has continued to break records, which is what you would expect in a marketplace where average pressure eases before scarcity does.

There is also a straightforward monetization of location underway. Once you segment supply by transit access, school proximity, and view corridors, today’s HDB resale market looks like a platform with hard KYC rules and gated liquidity. Buyers are not paying a round number for brand signaling. They are pricing a bundle of micro features that cannot be replicated in new launches for a decade due to long MOPs and resale clawbacks under Plus and Prime. In platform terms, the seller-side supply has become stickier and less contestable, which raises the clearing price where demand is deepest.

The quarterly data backs the structural read. Price growth in Q2 2025 was the smallest since mid 2020, yet the market recorded a historic high of million-dollar transactions for the quarter. Analysts now expect full-year resale price gains to moderate to roughly 4 to 5.5 per cent, while transaction volumes remain healthy. Softening averages with rising high-end counts is exactly what structural scarcity produces. It is a reallocation within the distribution, not a runaway curve.

If you map buyer behavior, the logic tightens. Dual-income households in their thirties and forties are using grants and accumulated savings to trade time for location. Some would have been first-time private buyers during the low-rate years, but with private home affordability stretched and ABSD considerations biting for second-property households, a prime or near-prime HDB resale becomes the rational choice. Easing interest rates in 2025 reduce monthly friction just enough to widen this lane, without reintroducing excess leverage. The result is more willing bidders at the top of the HDB resale book.

None of this means the market is unmoored. HDB has been tightening the credit and classification levers to keep the system anchored. The Standard, Plus, Prime framework will, over time, create a new cohort of flats whose resale rules slow capital gains and widen occupancy requirements. That should thin out the future pipeline of million-dollar candidates in the very center. The paradox is timing. The stricter rules make older, unrestricted central stock more valuable today, which is why the share of million-dollar deals has risen even as overall growth cools. Policy is working as intended on affordability for future first owners. It is also producing a transitional premium in legacy stock.

What should operators, policymakers, and serious market watchers read from this. First, the million-dollar phenomenon is a byproduct of design. Constrained resale supply in prime locations, longer hold periods, and targeted grants inevitably push more demand into a thin slice of inventory that is both central and unconstrained. Second, the top of the market will remain active even through index moderation because scarcity lives in attributes, not averages. Third, supply relief is coming, but it is sequenced. Shorter-wait launches arriving by 2027 will ease pressure, but they will be bound by rules that make their eventual resale less of a lottery and more of a regulated trade. Expect fewer million-dollar headlines from those cohorts and more from legacy central stock until the composition effect fades.

The final tell is how the distribution behaves. If monthly million-dollar counts continue to hover near five to seven per cent of resales while the index grows at a slower clip, it confirms this is not a bubble signal. It is a system signal. The market is repricing rarity inside a rules-based platform. Prices will ebb with rates and the business cycle, but the structural premium on scarce, well-located, pre-framework flats will not vanish until the new classification regime fully dilutes it. Operators can debate fairness. Markets will price constraints.