Over 50,000 flats to be launched from 2025 to 2027

Some 19,600 Build-To-Order (BTO) flats will be launched in 2025, as part of continued efforts by the authorities to address shocks to the housing market caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

These flats will be among more than 50,000 units that the Housing Board will launch from 2025 to 2027.

The figures, revealed by Minister for National Development Desmond Lee in a media interview on Jan 13, will mean that the authorities would have launched around 102,300 new flats from 2021 to 2025, exceeding their target of 100,000 flats.

This was an effort to ramp up housing supply after the pandemic caused construction to come to a halt, which led to delays for many BTO projects – some for up to 12 months.

Mr Lee said keys to the last pandemic-delayed BTO project will be handed out “in a matter of weeks”.

“I wouldn’t say we entirely resolved everything, but I think after a few years, we’ve not just addressed the issue of pandemic-delayed flats, but also addressed (demand from first-timer applicants).”

The 2025 flat supply includes 3,800 flats with shorter waiting times of below three years. The number of flats that will be launched in 2025 is similar to the 19,637 units released in 2024.

In February 2025, HDB will launch 5,000 BTO flats and another 5,500 balance flats for sale – the largest exercise for these flats to date.

Mr Lee said beyond 2027, the Government will study the demand for homes before deciding how many flats to launch.

He noted that the Covid-19 pandemic was the “crisis of a generation”, which had a significant impact on construction and housing, and created challenges both in terms of supply and demand.

“We had the challenge with supply... because we shut down construction for the first time in our history,” Mr Lee said, adding that constraints on supply chains and manpower meant also that the pipeline of new flats was affected significantly.

On the demand side, BTO application rates shot up overnight as people were worried about housing and brought forward plans to apply for a flat.

Five years on, the Government has managed to address “quite a number” of these supply and demand challenges that confronted the public housing market, Mr Lee said.

He pointed out that amid efforts to ramp up supply, demand for BTO flats has stabilised.

In 2024, there were 2.1 first-time applicants for each flat, lower than the rate of 3.7 in 2019, he said. But this is slightly higher than the rate of 1.9 in 2023.

Shorter waiting time flats – those that are already being built when they are launched – will become “quite a major feature of our BTO flat supply” in the years to come, he said.

About 2,800 of these flats were launched in 2024.

“Were it not for Covid-19, there would have been more shorter waiting time flats over the last few years, but they were all sacrificed because of the spike in demand during Covid,” said Mr Lee.

Asked if there will be at least one project with shorter waiting time flats in each BTO launch, Mr Lee said this would not necessarily be the case. He declined to reveal where these flats will be launched in 2025, and said details will be announced later.

In the private housing market, 8,505 units (including executive condominiums) will be made available in the first half of 2025 across 10 confirmed-list sites and nine reserve-list sites, up from 8,140 units in the second half of 2024.

The measures to address concerns over affordability that Mr Lee outlined included the launch of the new flat classification system in 2024, which sorts BTO flats into Standard, Plus and Prime categories based on their proximity to the city centre and amenities, as well as transport connectivity.

Flats in attractive locations, which fall under the Prime and Plus categories, come with greater subsidies to keep them affordable, but they also have stricter resale restrictions such as a subsidy clawback and 10-year minimum occupation period.

Other measures he cited included the move to lower the loan-to-value limit for HDB housing loans from 80 per cent to 75 per cent in August 2024. At that time, the Enhanced CPF Housing Grant was also increased to help first-time home buyers in the lower- to middle-income brackets.

Turning to single home buyers, Mr Lee noted that demand from such applicants surged after the restriction that limited them to BTO flats in non-mature estates was lifted in October’s sales exercise.

He added that the authorities are committed to launch more two-room flexi flats from 2025 to address demand from singles and seniors, pointing out that such units make up 25 per cent of the 5,000 BTO flats that will be rolled out in February.

The upcoming Family Care Scheme, which grants singles priority access when they buy a home near or with their parents, is expected to drive more demand from singles when it kicks in from mid-2025, he noted.

Mr Lee also gave an update on measures implemented in the BTO market, including those to help first-timers secure their BTO flats and the stricter rules for applicants who reject offers to book units.

Since the First-Timer (Parents and Married Couples) priority category took effect, nine in 10 applicants under this group, on average, were invited to book a flat in the three BTO sales exercises from October 2023 to February 2024, he said.

These are exercises in which bookings have been completed.

First-timer families with Singaporean children aged 18 and below, as well as married couples aged 40 and below, are eligible for the priority category, which gives them three ballot chances in their BTO and Sale of Balance Flats applications. Up to 40 per cent of the flat supply are set aside for this group of applicants.

Meanwhile, the tighter rules for applicants who do not select a BTO flat when invited to do so, which kicked in from October 2023, resulted in a decline in the proportion of BTO applicants who did not book a flat.

Across the three sales exercises, the proportion dropped to 19 per cent, from 40 per cent before, Mr Lee said.

“This means that people were thinking more carefully before they apply, and thinking a lot carefully before they reject,” he said.

Under these rules, first-timer applicants who do not select a BTO flat would be considered second-timers in subsequent flat applications for a year. Those who get a queue position falling within the flat supply also cannot apply for a flat in later exercises until after their booking appointment.

With that, the HDB will issue two times more queue numbers than the flat supply from February’s BTO exercise, down from three times previously, Mr Lee said.

He said it is “the right time to do so”, as the booking chances of applicants who have queue numbers above two times the flat supply were much lower than before.

It also gives applicants more certainty in whether they should apply for the next sales exercise, rather than worry about incurring a non-selection penalty, he added.

“The aim is to help genuine home buyers, particularly first-timers, to be able to get (a home) to settle down.”