How to tell if an asking price is fair
Comparable flats in the same town sell across a wide band of prices. Judging an asking price means working out where in that band a particular flat should sit.
Say you have found a flat you like and the listing says $700,000. The agent mentions that a unit two floors up went for $720,000 last month, which makes this one sound cheap. Is it?
Every HDB resale price is public, which makes this easier to check here than in most property markets. The record does not give you one fair price for a flat, though. It gives you a range, and the range is wider than most people expect.
How wide the range is
Take one town, one flat type and one year: Tampines four-room flats in 2025, of which there were 892 sales. The median was $668,000. The 10th percentile was $595,000 and the 90th was $790,000. Even the middle half of sales, the most ordinary flats, ran from $620,000 to $758,000.
Tampines is typical. Across the 22 towns with enough four-room sales to measure, the middle 50% usually spans about 19% of the median. So if you take any one recent sale as the going rate, you may be comparing against a flat that is quite different from the one you are looking at.
What puts a flat high or low in the range
Most of the spread comes from things you can see in the record: floor, remaining lease, exact location, size and flat model. These are the same factors that affect prices around MRT stations. Floor level alone makes a large difference:
| Floor | Median price | Sales |
|---|---|---|
| Low (1–6) | $635,000 | 408 |
| Mid (7–12) | $680,000 | 391 |
| High (13+) | $790,000 | 93 |
Floor, remaining lease and distance to the MRT together explain most of where a given flat ends up. Once you know those for the flat you are looking at, you can say roughly where it should sit.
Placing one flat in the range
There is no fair price for a Tampines four-room flat in general. The useful question is where this particular flat should sit, given its floor, lease, location and condition, and whether the asking price matches. A high-floor unit with a long lease, close to the MRT and recently renovated should be near the top, at $758k or more. A low-floor unit with a shorter lease and a longer walk to the station should be near the bottom, at around $620k or less. The town median is only a starting point, and the one sale an agent mentions is not much of a guide at all.
Five checks before you make an offer
- Start from the median of many sales. Take recent comparables (same town, same flat type, last twelve months) and use their median. Don't anchor on a single sale, or on the cheapest listing you have seen.
- Adjust for this flat. Move up or down from that median for floor (the biggest factor), remaining lease, distance to the MRT, and size or model.
- Compare price per square foot as well as the total. A bigger flat costs more without being more expensive per square foot, so $psf lets you compare flats of different sizes.
- Use recent sales. Prices in 2022 were a different market. Give the last few months the most weight.
- Check the asking price against the range. A price above the middle band should come with a reason, such as a top floor, a long lease or a renovation. If there is no obvious reason, that is where you have room to negotiate.
To build your own set of comparable sales, This Year has recent monthly medians by town and flat type, and Analysis by Town adds price per square foot and distance to the MRT.