Saturday November 12, 2005

HDB Resale Flat Prices

HDB has updated their website, so the links blogged earlier may no longer be valid. For those who have neither the time nor patience to wade through the entire site, here are the new direct links to the price statistics pages for HDB resale flats :

1. HDB Resale Price Index
2. HDB Resale Averages
3. HDB Resale Enquiry

The HDB Resale Price Index is a weighted index of all resale flat prices, on a quarterly basis. Prices for the various regions and flat types are given different weightings and the figure for 4Q98 is arbitrarily assigned 100.0. So this is sort of like the S&P500 or NASDAQ equivalent for HDB resale prices. Currently it's at 101.2 for 3Q05, which is 26% down from the all-time high of 136.9 back in the bubble era of 4Q96.

The HDB Resale Averages zooms down into average valuations by town & flat type, also on a quarterly basis. So you can, for example, see how 5-room flats in Sengkang have been selling for on average in the past quarter or two.

The HDB Resale Enquiry zooms further into individual resale transactions. You can query by flat type, town name, street name, all the way to individual block numbers. To give some measure of privacy protection the exact unit numbers are not given, rather a range is given (for Sengkang, low floor 01-05, mid floor 06-10 or high floor 11-15, etc). If you live in the particular block, you may be able to match, via observation, those who have moved in/out and doing renovations with the pricings listed here.

- Why all the interest? 1. Over 80% of the population in Singapore lives in HDB apartment flats, so this is an important though lagging macro-economic indicator, 2. I live in one, so obviously I am interested in the current price even though I have no interest in selling, and 3. I have an ongoing bet with Biow on the direction of resale prices for our flat (even though we have no interest of selling, and we are still comfortably in the black due to the "first-timer discount").

Since I am betting on a deflationary trend in big-ticket items (such as houses and cars) and inflation in basic commodity items (food, energy, and the various materials and resources), I have put down for a low-ball figure while Biow has put in a slightly higher one. So far the price has gone down a little and it is now right in between our bets, so it's a 50-50 toss-up to see where it goes next from here.

I'm still betting on deflation for big-ticket items though :)

(2005-11-12 11:39:31 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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