Singapore raises ABSD by 5 to 10 points and tightens LTV limits

Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty was raised by 5 percentage points for individuals, excluding Singapore Citizens and Singapore Permanent Residents purchasing their first residential property.

SC first property remained 0% and SPR first property remained 5%; these were not increases of zero within a general rise but explicit exclusions from it.

Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty for entities was raised by 10 percentage points, from 15% to 25%.

An additional 5% non-remittable Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty was introduced for housing developers, on top of the 25% entity rate.

Scope note: the 25% component remained potentially remittable subject to prescribed housing-development commencement, completion and sale conditions. The 5% component was payable upfront and not remittable.

Foreigner Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty was raised from 15% to 20%.

Singapore Permanent Resident rates for a second residential property and for a third or subsequent residential property were both 10% before the change and both rose to 15%.

VERIFIED. Before 6 July 2018 the ABSD rate was 10% for BOTH an SPR second property and an SPR third or subsequent property. A schedule that shows a rising ladder across SPR property counts before this date is wrong.

Loan-to-value limits for financial-institution housing loans were tightened by 5 percentage points across the applicable tiers; loans granted by HDB were unaffected.

Scope note: the exemption is defined by LENDER, not property type. An HDB flat purchased with a covered financial-institution loan WAS affected. This is the scope error the event most often produces.

The Mortgage Equity Withdrawal Loan limit for a borrower with an outstanding housing loan on another residential property fell from 60% to 45%.

MWL limits were NOT tightened uniformly by 5 percentage points. A borrower without an outstanding housing loan on another residential property went 80% to 75%, five points; a borrower with one went 60% to 45%, fifteen points.

The loan-to-value limit for a housing loan granted by a financial institution to a borrower with no outstanding housing loan was reduced from 80% to 75%, for loans within the standard tenure and age limits.

The standard tier only. Where the loan tenure exceeded 30 years for private residential property or 25 years for an HDB flat, or extended beyond the borrower age of 65, the limit was reduced from 60% to 55% instead.

The measures took effect on 6 July 2018.

Under the ABSD transitional provision, the previous rates applied where the OTP was granted on or before 5 July 2018, was not varied on or after 6 July 2018, and was exercised on or before 26 July 2018 or within its original validity period, whichever was earlier.

The transitional treatment applied to ABSD, NOT to the tightened LTV limits, which had no equivalent grandfathering. It protected existing transactions; it did NOT give the general market three weeks to initiate new purchases at old rates. The 26 July date was a ceiling, not an entitlement: an OTP whose own validity expired sooner expired sooner.

The Property Price Index for all private residential property rose from 144.1 in Q1 2018 to 149.0 in Q2 2018, an increase of 3.4% quarter on quarter.

Flash and final estimates were identical; URA did not revise the headline. Reconciled against the Prevo metric store with delta 0.00. Briefly stored as a separate claim 16 during the founder pass on 13 August 2026, before migration 0018 made the split unnecessary.

Developers sold 7,972 private residential units excluding executive condominiums in 2016 and 10,566 in 2017.

TWO preliminary figures from the same 15 January 2018 URA release must be rejected, not one. The archive carried 10,682 as the final total until the founder primary-source pass on 13 August 2026, having explicitly rejected 14,707 in the same sentence.

Approximately 1,000 units were reportedly sold across Park Colonial, Riverfront Residences and Stirling Residences in under five hours on 5 July 2018. The figures were preliminary and based partly on developer, agency and industry-source reports. (Unnumbered in audit; the distinctive-finding figure, stored so it is not prose-only.)

Cannot settle, secondary, and deliberately retained at corroborated by several secondary sources rather than upgraded. Contemporaneous reports give Riverfront Residences more than 500, Stirling Residences about 200 and Park Colonial about 300, and the reporting itself warned that some figures were not final. They were preliminary and partly agency-supplied rather than consolidated official developer filings.

Unsold private residential units with planning approval excluding executive condominiums stood at 23,514 at end-Q1 2018 and 26,943 at end-Q2 2018. (Unnumbered in audit; the corrected pre-event supply figures.)

Corrected characterisation: existing unsold inventory had previously been drawn down, but by Q2 2018 the approved unsold pipeline was already rising as replacement supply from the en-bloc cycle entered the planning pipeline. Including executive condominiums the audit gives 24,193 then 26,961; those are not reconstructable from loaded data because the source file carries no EC dimension.

At end-Q2 2018, awarded collective-sale sites without planning approval represented approximately 11,100 potential private residential units. Together with Government Land Sales sites without planning approval, the potential supply was approximately 19,500 units. (Unnumbered in audit; replaced the 2017 collective-sale transaction tally on the founder pass.)

REPLACES a dropped claim rather than correcting it. The previous claim counted approximately 28 residential collective-sale sites at approximately S$8.7 billion in 2017. Published tallies conflict because they count different property types, transaction stages and cut-off dates: other tallies give approximately 26 deals at S$8.5 billion. The claim did not state which universe it used, and "approximately" does not cure a definition problem, so it was dropped as DISPUTED rather than qualified further. This URA figure is analytically superior for the same argument: it measures the supply pressure facing policymakers rather than an unstable transaction count. The 19,500 combined total is stated in the text.

JLL estimated residential collective-sale value at approximately S$10.3 billion in the first half of 2018, S$413 million in the second half, and S$174 million in 2019.

Jll tracker series. Not to be combined with the CBRE series below: the two use different definitions and a blended figure would be one nobody published. JLL reported most post-measure 2H 2018 value came from non-residential sites.

CBRE reported residential collective-sale value of approximately S$9.69 billion in the first half of 2018 and approximately S$484 million in the second half.

Cbre tracker series. Not to be combined with the JLL series above.

Residential collective-sale value fell by approximately 95% between the first and second halves of 2018.

TRACKER-INDEPENDENT: the contraction holds on either consistent series, JLL 10.3bn to 0.413bn or CBRE 9.69bn to 0.484bn. This is the one en-bloc figure that may be stated without naming a tracker, because both agree on it.

In 2019, only five collective-sale sites of all types transacted, at approximately S$461 million, of which one was wholly residential. Horizon Towers extended its tender and closed without a bid.

Press-sourced. The Horizon Towers no-bid is a reported event, not an official record.

URA reported 1,724 new private residential units sold in July 2018 excluding executive condominiums, of which the three launch-night projects accounted for 1,396: Riverfront Residences 628, Park Colonial 429 and Stirling Residences 339, including post-implementation sales.

URA-OFFICIAL-VIA-REPORTING: the figures originate with URA but were read from contemporaneous coverage, not from a retrieved URA series. The night estimates and the monthly totals must not be conflated. The rush was roughly 60% of July sales on contemporaneous reporting, so July 2018 is not a valid observation of underlying post-policy demand.

The private residential Property Price Index rose 3.4% in Q2 2018, then 0.5% in Q3 2018 and fell 0.1% in Q4 2018, giving a calendar-2018 change of approximately 7.9% measured Q4 to Q4. Through 2019 the index fell 0.7% in Q1 and rose 1.5%, 1.3% and 0.5% in the following quarters, a calendar-2019 change of approximately 2.7%.

Computed 14 August 2026 from SingStat TableBuilder M212261, Residential Properties series, base 1Q2009 = 100. The four-quarter change from Q2 2017 to Q2 2018 computes to 9.08%, agreeing to the rounding with the 9.1% the Government cited. The two remain separate claims with separate provenance: one is a fact about the release, the other about the series.

The Government stated that private residential prices had declined gradually for close to four years, began rising in Q3 2017, and had increased sharply by 9.1% over the preceding year.

Verified as a statement made. Independently computed: false. Store as official policy characterisation, not as a Prevo-computed figure. The "close to four years" refers to the 15-quarter decline recorded in the June 2013 event, Q4 2013 to Q2 2017.