Where can you find data related to housing in Singapore?
A rundown of all locatable datasets about housing, prices, systems and others in Singapore
Singapore’s housing is a story that has intrigued millions all over the world. Often touted as a success story of the nation’s rag to riches, or an engineering marvel where thousands were moved from squatters to secure homes within decades, it is a topic that invites inspiration and criticism.
Personally, I have always been fascinated by the strong connections between the material realities of living in Singapore’s public housing to certain myths and narratives that encompasses the Singapore identity. I’ve written about this topic before on the accessibility and affordability of public housing, or about how some of our food culture and habits form around these estates, and also investigated the rental housing problems.
Across my work, I have also come across interesting data nuggets and surprises that challenge our (as in, Singaporeans) strongly held assumptions about what is going on right now. There are dozens of blogs, newsletters, and pages out there that analyse our property markets daily, and I thought I’d toss my few cents into the mix with a short series of articles on what I’ve found.
In this first article, I’ll first cover a gist of Singapore’s housing situation and what datasets exist to talk about it.
To put it in simplest terms, one may own residential property in Singapore in public or private housing.
Public housing is governed and managed by the Housing Development Board (HDB). Unlike in many other countries where public housing is coded for council flats or living-off-government benefits, between 70 to 80 percent of the population lives in these units.
Despite typical language that revolves around transactions (i.e. sale), HDB flats are not sold or bought, but leased for 99-years from when it was built or released. One may acquire a lease directly from HDB, through a household giving up a lease, or inheriting/getting transferred a lease.
Acquiring a lease directly from HDB:
Balloting for a Built-to-Order (BTO) or a Sale of Balance (SBF) flat directly from HDB, where flats are allocated to successful balloters and built within 3 to 4 years. These will be fresh leases of 99-years.
Acquiring a lease through sale from the market:
Purchasing a lease from the resale market, which means these flats have passed certain requirements such as a Minimum Occupation Period (MOP), and typically span a wide range of variety of age, size, built, and so on. These typically have less than 99-years left on the lease.
Acquiring a lease through transfer or inheritance:
You have been passed down, or retained a lease, through divorce, death of a family member, or so on.
Acquiring a rental directly from HDB or from an existing owner (not considered ownership or a lease):
You rent a small flat directly from HDB, but this is heavily conditioned on your income, with limited spots and locations across the country.
You rent from the rental market, from someone who owns an existing HDB lease.
Acquisition of private property, in contrast, might be a little simpler in the sense that it’s just like most places in the world. You find a property you like, and you buy it directly from its previous owner or a developer. Private property comes in various sizes and types, and are either freehold (perpetual ownership) or with a 99-years lease.
The price values of public and private properties vary greatly, and I will explain this with a data exploration in a later post.
This is where it is going to get a little complicated.
Data about Singapore’s housing market primarily comes from state sources, with many other intermediaries providing their interpretations of it as well. The main two sources of housing data are HDB themselves, and the Urban Development Authority (URA).
In recent years, Open Government Products have been developing a consolidated data repository for all datasets released by state or government affiliated agencies and bodies in data.gov.sg. They have over 100 datasets related to housing, but not all of the crucial ones are available. If a dataset is available on this repository, one can safely say that it is downloadable in .csv form, and usable to that extent.
This dataset has every flat transacted from 1990 to present in the Resale market. It has details such as price, location, size, age, type, and so on.
From this, one can deduce and answer many questions concerning the bulk of Singapore’s property market.
Private Property Transactions Data
Information about the latest private property transactions is available, but not exactly in granular detail.
There are other datasets concerning housing on data.gov.sg, but they’re largely inconsequential to the housing market conversation. Meaning, they’re mostly zone files, parking, and other miscellaneous estate related.
Housing Development Board Data
The majority of the remaining public housing data is available in bits and pieces on HDB’s website itself, mostly under their news and publications section. This data is embedded in press releases, annual reports, and other forms.
To name a few of the key ones and where they sit:
Annual Reports that include key statistics around HDB’s general performance
Press Releases that contain numbers about various HDB policies
Upcoming or latest BTO/SBF sale exercises
Latest Application Rates concerning HDB sales
I personally find the application rates the most interesting, because it is not an often looked at dataset but it is very critical to understanding some core issues, which I’ll cover in another post.
Private property data is consolidated by the URA in a central system, but there are also some other versions available on data.gov.sg, and on a few of their webpages.
Real Estate Information System (REALIS)
A one-stop-shop for all matters concerning real estate data in Singapore. This portal is unfortunately not free, but URA provides great detail on what is available and their formats.
A free, slightly lesser version of this is available here, where one can look up transactions up to the last 60 months and download charts.
Non-State Related Sources
When I was researching a story on the attainability of public housing in Singapore previously, I really wanted a consolidated dataset on BTOs in Singapore, which was shockingly difficult to locate in state sources. The information is largely scattered throughout HDB’s site, and many older BTO projects have been taken down or archived. To consolidate a list of my own would take an immense amount of time, but it was important to look into the price points and availability of BTO flats in answering a question of access.
This was when I chanced upon the wonderful and very curious Teoalida. I believe it is anonymously manned, but the person behind this page has meticulously curated and consolidated a variety of housing datasets in Singapore which can be purchased for a fee in recognition of their time and labour.
A list of all HDB flats in Singapore (you’ll be surprised at how hard it is to get this dataset even though it sounds pretty basic)
He’s also got other pages detailing the evolution of HDB flat types, their brochures and information, and so on. This person is doing a great public service!
Part of my work at Kontinentalist is to participate in data activism, and to make some of this information more accessible and available for a variety of uses, be it to estimate price, understand the complicated creature that is Singapore’s public housing, or critique policies.
This is overall a summary of the housing related datasets available on the internet that I could find and that I know of. I may have missed some, and will be happy to update this as I chance upon more information.