The Property Insider

Most buyers I meet are not lazy, and they are not uninformed. They read the news, they track listings, they can quote the latest cooling measure. What holds them back is something quieter: the belief that waiting is the safe choice, that doing nothing costs nothing, and that one day the market will hand them an obvious moment to enter. This piece, distilled from my Property Insider video series, is the full argument for why that belief is the most expensive one in Singapore property, and what to do instead.

The goalpost is moving while you stand still

Here is what nobody tells the buyer who is "waiting for the right time": the right time is being repriced every few months, in public, at land tender results most buyers never read.

Singapore's developers are running low on land bank, and they replenish it the only way they can, by bidding for sites at state land tenders and in the en bloc market. Those bids have been landing at S$1,300 to S$1,800 per square foot per plot ratio. That number matters because land is the single largest cost inside every new launch. A developer who paid S$1,500 psf ppr for land cannot sell finished homes anywhere near that number once you add construction, financing, marketing and margin. The land price is the floor, and everything above it stacks on top.

So each round of tenders quietly resets what the next launch in that area must charge. Which means that every month spent waiting is not a month of standing still; it is a month in which the benchmark you will eventually pay drifts upward. While you are waiting for the right time to enter, the market is shifting the goalpost further and further away.

This is also the boring truth behind a phenomenon people love to call hype: new launches selling out on day one. It is not agents pushing hard, and it is mostly not FOMO. The buyers at the front of that queue have looked at the tender results in the area and can already see what the next project on the next plot of land will have to launch at. Measured against that future number, today's launch looks reasonable. They are not buying on emotion; they are buying because they did the maths on land. That is why the units move.

"I'll wait for prices to drop"

I understand the instinct. Nobody wants to buy near a top. But look at how this has actually played out: buyers who started waiting in 2020 are, for the most part, still waiting, while the ones who bought are sitting on gains in the region of 30 to 40 percent. The waiting was not free. It was the most expensive decision they never made.

And there is a structural reason the big correction never seems to arrive on schedule. Think about what happens when a large crowd waits together. The moment interest rates ease or sentiment turns, every fence-sitter jumps at the same time. Demand does not return gradually; it spikes. Sellers feel it immediately and stop negotiating. The very dip everyone was waiting to catch gets swallowed by the crowd that was waiting alongside them. In a market full of waiting buyers, corrections are shallow and short because the queue to buy the dip is already formed.

Layer the policy reality on top. This market has been through the Asian Financial Crisis, the Global Financial Crisis and a pandemic, and each time it recovered and pushed higher. That is not luck. The government actively manages this market: when it runs hot, cooling measures arrive; when it stalls, they ease. Nobody in policy wants a crash, because the home is where most Singaporean household wealth lives. You are not waiting for a free market to capitulate. You are waiting for a managed market to do something its manager is determined to prevent.

So the honest question was never "when will prices drop". It is "will I be ready when my window opens": the right unit, at a price the data supports, inside your affordability. Windows do open, on individual projects, on individual units, in the gap before new land bids get confirmed. They just do not announce themselves as market-wide crashes, and they do not stay open long.

You are probably stronger than you feel

At this point most buyers raise the same objection: fine, but prices are high, rates are not cheap, can I even afford to act? I went looking for the honest answer in the national numbers, and they surprised even me.

At the time I filmed this, Singapore households collectively held about S$3.49 trillion in assets against roughly S$384 billion in liabilities. Hold those two numbers side by side: for every dollar owed, households hold roughly nine. CPF balances keep compounding quietly in the background, personal disposable income has risen across the decade, and the gap between what people earn and what they spend keeps widening into savings. Whatever the headlines say about affordability, the balance sheet of the average Singaporean household has rarely been this strong.

Now, be careful with what this does and does not mean. It does not mean you should stretch to the ceiling of what a bank will lend you; I will never advise that, and every plan I build keeps a buffer of balance funds sized in months of mortgage payments. What it means is narrower and more useful: the felt sense of "I probably can't afford anything now" is often wrong. When I actually sit down with buyers and work through their income, CPF and savings under the real lending rules, most discover their position is stronger than they assumed. The market is not priced beyond Singaporeans; it is priced beyond guesswork. If you have not run your numbers properly, you do not actually know which side of the line you are on. You can start with my affordability calculator, which applies the actual TDSR and stress-test rules.

What actually made buyers money: the entry, not the postcode

Ask any coffee shop and you will hear the same formula: buy near the MRT, near the amenities, good location, sure win. But when I look at who actually made the most over the last ten years, the pattern is different. Location put a floor under their outcome. What drove the outcome was the entry: getting into the right product at the right price, before the next wave of land bids pushed benchmark prices in that area higher.

The reason is mechanical, not mystical. A great location bought above its fair value has already spent its advantage; you paid for the MRT station twice. An honest product bought below the incoming benchmark has the future working for it: every confirmed land bid nearby resets what "expensive" means, and your entry starts to look cheap by comparison. Right now there is still a window where certain projects are priced below what future launches in the same area will have to charge. Once those bids are confirmed and the new projects launch, today's pricing suddenly reads as the bargain everyone wishes they had taken. I have watched this play out repeatedly. It is not luck. It is timing backed by data.

The same logic settles the new launch versus resale debate, which I have broken down fully in its own article. The short version: do not decide on PSF alone. Put the launch against every resale option within 800 metres and compare layout efficiency, the age of the property, the land-bid support underneath the pricing, and whether the resale is really cheaper once renovation and total quantum are counted, or only cheaper on paper. More often than not the gap is smaller than the headline numbers suggest. And then ask the better question: not which is cheaper, but which is safer.

The variable almost everyone overlooks: supply

If I had to name the single factor most buyers never check, it is future supply. From 2029 onwards, the pipeline of new residential completions drops sharply. This is not a secret; it is visible in the completion schedules, and the developers can see it more clearly than anyone. It is precisely why they are bidding so aggressively for land now: they are racing to replenish their pipelines before the gap arrives.

Follow the chain of consequences for an owner. Fewer completions means more buyers competing for fewer good units when the gap hits. It means rental demand concentrates on existing stock, which supports yields. And it means the resale value of what you already own holds firmer, because the alternative for the next buyer, waiting for something new, gets thinner every year. When you buy ahead of a supply gap, you are not just buying a home; you are buying into a supply story that works in your favour for years. The buyers who see this are acting now. The ones who do not will be competing with each other inside the gap.

The discipline that holds it all together

Everything above explains why acting beats waiting. None of it means acting blindly, and this is where I will say clearly what I tell every client: I am not here to sell you a unit. I am here to make sure the numbers make sense for you, specifically. Not every project makes money; I have said that on camera and I will keep saying it. The difference between the buyers who compound and the buyers who regret is not courage. It is three checks, done before anything is signed.

The first check anchors your entry price against what future land bids say the price floor in that area will be, so you know whether you are buying ahead of the benchmark or above it. The second forces the honest comparison with resale in the same area, because sometimes the resale genuinely is the better deal, and you want to know that before committing, not after. The third is the one that separates a plan from a purchase: who are your future buyers, at what price does your exit work, and does your holding power survive a bad year? If the exit does not make sense on paper today, the entry does not make sense either, whatever the showflat feels like.

Many buyers come to me after they have bought somewhere else, asking exactly these questions, in exactly this order, two years too late. The questions have not changed. Only the timing has. Don't be that buyer.

Where this leaves you

Pull the threads together and the picture is coherent. Prices are being set by land bids you can read for yourself. Supply is tightening on a schedule you can see coming. The average household's capacity to act is stronger than the mood suggests. None of that is a reason to rush into anything, and it is certainly not a promise that anything you buy will make money. It is a reason to stop outsourcing your decision to a market moment that is not coming, and to get ready deliberately: numbers run under the real lending rules, entry price checked against the data, exit strategy written down before the cheque is. Basically, the buyers who do well are not the ones who timed the market. They are the ones who were ready when their window opened.