30 April 2018 – Non-landed home prices across Singapore grew by 4.4 percent compared to a marginal increase of 0.8 percent previously.
Private home across Singapore rose by 3.9 percent quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2018, faster than the 0.8 percent increase in the preceding three-month period, according to an updated Property Price Index released by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) on Friday (27 Apr).
This not only represents three straight quarters of rising prices, said PropNex Realty, but it also marks the highest quarterly price increase since Q2 2010 when overall values grew 5.3 percent.
Non-landed homes posted a higher price growth of 4.4 percent compared to a marginal increase of 0.8 percent previously, with all three regions recording sharper price gains. Similarly, prices of landed homes increased by 1.9 percent versus the 0.5 percent gain in the previous quarter. The Outside Central Region (OCR) saw the biggest jump, with prices rising from 0.8 percent to 5.6 percent – the highest quarterly increase since a 5.7 percent growth in Q2 2010, noted PropNex.
In the Core Central Region (CCR), non-landed home prices climbed 5.5 percent quarter-on-quarter in Q1 after rising by only 1.4 percent in the last quarter of 2017, while the Rest of Central Region (RCR) saw a modest uptick of 1.2 percent from 0.4 percent previously.
“OCR’s price increase was contributed by the strong pricing of the 329 units sold at The Tapestry as well projects like Kingsford Waterbay (95 units) and Parc Botannia (84 units),” said Leong Boon Hoe, chief operating officer of List Sotheby’s International Realty, Singapore.
“CCR’s price increase was mainly supported by the 40 units sold at New Futura, 8 Hullet (15 units) and Martin Modern (41 units).”
Meanwhile, PropNex revealed that overall private residential deals in the first quarter improved to 5,328 units from 5,202 in Q1 2017, with the number of transacted resale units surging from 1,496 to 3,666.
“First quarter numbers clearly demonstrate (a) rebound in the real estate market, the resale property market has performed well with increase of 69 percent year-on-year, highlighting the greater demand of en blocers finding replacement homes,” said PropNex CEO Ismail Gafoor.
“Resale segment performed better than the new sale segment due to two reasons. Firstly, most of the existing stocks of new projects have been absorbed in 2017 and there is limited supply of new launches in Q1 2018. However, we expect the new launch segment to pick up with more developments lined up for launch in the second half of the year.”
Looking ahead, he expects private home prices to rise by five percent for the first half of 2018, possibly ending the year with a price growth of 8.0 to 10 percent. Furthermore, Ismail expects total private residential sales to reach more than 25,000 units this year, or the highest since 2013 when transaction volumes started falling after the government introduced a series of property cooling measures.