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HDB resale flat sales down 9.4% in August

This article is more than 12 months old

Despite slump, a five-room Pinnacle@Duxton flat sold for $1.2 million

Fewer Housing Board resale flats were sold last month than in July, but their prices moved up slightly.

In all, 1,921 such flats changed hands, a 9.4 per cent drop from July, real estate portal SRX Property said yesterday, releasing its preliminary figures.

When compared with a year ago, the August decline was 7.6 per cent.

Four-room flats topped the list with 42.2 per cent of those sold in August, followed by five-room (23.7 per cent), three-room (23.4 per cent) and executive flats (8.3 per cent). The rest were multi-generation and two-room flats.

As for prices, they moved up 0.1 per cent in a month. But when compared with August last year, prices were down 0.6 per cent.

When placed against the peak in April 2013, the price plunge was 14.1 per cent.

Prices in non-mature estates, however, rose by 0.4 per cent year-on-year while those in mature estates fell 2.1 per cent.

A five-room Pinnacle@Duxton flat was sold at the top price of $1.2 million in August. It was one of eight HDB resale flats priced at more than $1,000 per sq ft this year.

A 22-year-old executive flat in Hougang sold for $831,500, the highest in a non-mature estate.

In the next three months, SRX forecast that 1,511 flats will enter the HDB resale market as they approach their five-year minimum occupation period.

Its calculations show people are probably not going to overpay on what SRX estimates to be the market value for flats.

Its data shows the overall median transaction over X-value (TOX) remained negative $1,000 last month.

The median TOX measures whether people are overpaying (in the case of a positive TOX) or underpaying (when it is a negative TOX) relative to the SRX Property X-value estimated market value for flats.

HDB executive flats recorded a positive median TOX value of $3,000 in August, while the three-room, four-room and five-room flats recorded negative median TOX values of $3,000, $1,000 and $1,000 respectively.

Flats in Bukit Batok recorded the highest median TOX at positive $11,000 while those in Bishan recorded the lowest median TOX at negative $17,000.

OrangeTee & Tie's head of research and consultancy Christine Sun said the drop in the August sales volume was expected, as sales activities are usually slower during the Chinese lunar seventh month.

She, however, noted that last month's resale volume was above the 12-month average of 1,830 units from August 2018 to July 2019.

"This indicates that demand for resale flats is still resilient. But it is still a buyers' market.

"We can expect resale prices to remain soft as competition is likely to stiffen further with more flats reaching their minimum occupation period in the coming months," she added.

Property