Price · volume · liquidity · what actually sellsmastplan
Landed housing had a strong 2025 — but not the year it is usually described as having, and not a year that helped every owner equally. This is what URA's own numbers say about price, volume and liquidity, and what a seller should do with them.
+7.6%
landed price index, full year 2025 — URA
+45%
cumulative landed price growth since end-2020
1,852
landed transactions in 2025 — a four-year high
What this report is, and what it is not.
Every price figure on this page comes from URA's quarterly real estate statistics — the published property price index for landed and non-landed private residential property, taken at full-year rather than quarterly resolution so that one strong quarter cannot carry a narrative. Transaction counts are the landed sales tallies reported for the same periods. Where a figure comes from somewhere else, the chart says so underneath it.
The second half of this report deals with liquidity rather than price, and liquidity is the harder thing to measure. There is no public dataset that says how long a house in a given district took to sell. What can be built is an absorption ratio — standing listings against the rate at which that district and type actually transacts. That ratio is a ranking of how thin a market is. It is not a calendar, and this page does not pretend it is one.
The third thing to say up front: a national report cannot price your house. It can tell you which side of the market you are on, whether your quantum sits in the liquid band or the thin one, and what the gap between asking prices and transacted prices looks like in your district. The last figure always belongs to the plot.
Finding one — landed did not have its best year. It had its widest year.
The line most often repeated about 2025 is that it was the strongest landed market in six years. On URA's price index that is not the case. Landed prices rose 7.6% across 2025. They rose 13.3% in 2021, 9.6% in 2022 and 8.0% in 2023. On price growth alone, 2025 was the fourth-best of the last five years.
Landed property price index, full-year change
Five consecutive years of URA's published annual landed price change. 2025 is the blue bar. It is a good year. It is not the best one in the series, and it is not close.
URA quarterly real estate statistics, full-year price index change for landed property, 2021 to 2025.
What actually made 2025 unusual is the gap. Non-landed private residential prices rose 2.3% across the same year. That is a 5.3 percentage-point spread between landed and everything else — the widest divergence in at least five years, and a complete reversal of 2024, when landed rose 0.9% against non-landed's 4.7%.
Landed against non-landed, rebased to 100 at the end of 2020
Both series start at the same point. The shaded area is the divergence, and the pill on each step is how far ahead landed is at that moment. Note 2024 — the gap nearly closes, and then 2025 opens it wider than it has ever been in this window.
LandedNon-landed
Computed by compounding URA's published full-year price index changes for landed and non-landed private residential property, 2021 to 2025, from a common base of 100 at 31 December 2020. The vertical axis starts at 90, not zero, so the divergence is legible.
That chart also settles a number that circulates a lot. Landed prices are frequently described as up about 36% since 2020. Compounding URA's own annual figures gives roughly 45% over 2021 to 2025. The 36% figure is very close to what non-landed did over the identical window — about 35.5% — which is probably where it came from. If you are an owner deciding whether to sell, the difference between 36% and 45% is nine points of your own equity, and it is worth having the right one.
2025 was not landed's best year. It was the year landed pulled away from everything else — which is a different claim, and a more useful one.
You’ve seen the market baseline
You've seen the market. Now see what gets a house sold.
You’ve seen the market baseline. The full report shows what determines whether a landed home attracts serious buyers, sits unsold or transacts at a defensible price.
The comp reality check — the asking-versus-transacted gap by district, and why your neighbour's listing is not your comparable.
The positioning thesis — the same house, two outcomes, and the honest arithmetic on what the difference is worth.
The big-plot question — when a detached plot is worth more as two products than as one, and how to tell before you list.
Who is actually buying — the buyer pool under landed is changing, and the direction matters if you are selling into it.
The pre-list sequence — six things to do before the listing goes live, in the order they need doing.
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Finding two — the market is strong. Your house may not be liquid.
Volume backs the price story up, but only partly. 1,852 landed homes changed hands in 2025, up about 11% on 2024 and the highest yearly count since 2021. That is a healthy market by any reading. It is also, in absolute terms, a very small one: fewer than two thousand transactions spread across every district, every type and every price band on the island, against a landed stock of roughly seventy thousand homes. Something in the order of one landed house in forty traded last year.
Which is why a seller's real question is not what the index did. It is how many buyers exist for the specific thing they own. Aggregate strength and individual liquidity are different variables, and in landed they can point in opposite directions at the same time.
Absorption ratio — standing listings against the rate of sale
Read this as a liquidity ranking, not as a countdown. It is standing inventory divided by the pace at which that district and type actually clears. The colour bands are where the market changes character.
Under 2 yr2–5 yr5–9 yrOver 10 yr
Absorption ratios, illustrative. Standing listings against transaction pace by district and property type. This is a ratio expressed in months, not a measured time-to-sell — no public dataset publishes the latter.
The spread from top to bottom is fourteen to one. Two owners can hold houses of almost identical value — a D19 terrace and a D18 semi-detached are not far apart on quantum — and be standing in completely different markets. One has a queue. The other has a shortlist, and it is short.
The index tells you what your asset class did. The absorption ratio tells you whether anyone is standing there when you decide to leave.
Finding three — whether to sell now depends entirely on what you buy next.
This is the part most sellers skip, and it is the part that determines whether the sale was a good decision or merely a completed one. A sale is not an outcome. It is one leg of a switch. The question is not whether your house has appreciated — in a rising market it almost certainly has. The question is what happens to the gap between what you are selling and what you are buying while you wait.
Switching up — to a stronger assetSelling a condo to buy landed. Selling an inter-terrace to buy a semi-detached. Moving from a thinner district into a deeper one. Here, waiting works against you: in a rising market the stronger asset appreciates faster than the one you hold, so the gap you have to fund widens every year you delay. If your finances and your house are ready, the argument for moving is a timing argument, not a market-view argument.
Switching down — to a softer assetSelling landed to downsize into a condo. Selling private to move to HDB. Here the same mechanic runs in your favour: the asset you hold is the one appreciating faster, so every year you wait, the gap closes in your direction. The 2025 data makes this unusually literal — landed ran 5.3 points ahead of non-landed in a single year. A downsizer who waited through 2025 was paid roughly that spread for waiting.
One honest limit on that. The 5.3-point spread is a single year's reading, and 2024 ran the other way by nearly four points. A rule built on one year is not a rule. What is durable is the shape of the argument — direction of switch determines whether time is a cost or a subsidy — and not the specific number attached to it in any given year.
Finding four — the neighbour's asking price is not the comp.
Sellers anchor to what is listed nearby, because listings are visible and transactions are not. But an asking price is a position, not a price. It carries no obligation, no counterparty and no valuation behind it, and in the thinner landed districts it can sit an extraordinary distance above what the same street actually clears at.
Detached asking prices against transacted prices, by district
How far the average standing asking price sits above the transacted level in the same district and type. Read the ordering, not the decimal — this is a directional ranking of where the anchor is most misleading.
Asking premium over transacted level, detached homes, by district. Directional. The underlying sample size and observation window are not published, so treat the ordering as the finding and the individual percentages as approximate.
What each anchor is worth on a $6M house
District
Asking premium
If you anchor to the ask
Realistic gap
D05 · Detached
+175%
$16.5M
$10.5M too high
D10 · Detached
+80%
$10.8M
$4.8M too high
D17 · Detached
+70%
$10.2M
$4.2M too high
D11 · Detached
+53%
$9.2M
$3.2M too high
D15 · Detached
+32%
$7.9M
$1.9M too high
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Illustrative. A $6M transacted level, marked up by each district's asking premium, to show the size of the anchoring error rather than to price any specific house.
That table is a model, not a measurement — but the mechanic behind it is real. A seller in a high-premium district who prices off listings is not asking 10% too much. They are asking a multiple. And because landed listings sit for a long time in thin districts, the listings visible to that seller are precisely the ones that have not sold. The anchor is built from the failures.
The fix is not complicated, and it is not optional. Pull the transacted records for your specific micro-pocket — street, type, plot band, last twenty-four months — and price against those. Caveat data is public. There is no information asymmetry left on this, only inertia.
Finding five — same house, two outcomes.
In the high-quantum landed market, the difference between a listing and a campaign shows up in the numbers, and it does not show up where sellers expect. It is not that better marketing produces more viewings. It is that better positioning produces fewer viewings, and a much higher proportion of them are real.
Two approaches to the same house
Listed on portals
Positioned first
What leads
Photographs and floor plan
The objection, answered up front
The buyer's first question
Why is it still listed?
Is the fix as good as they say?
Viewings
About 100
7
Conversion
No offer
Closed
Time on market
12+ months
Weeks
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Illustrative composite, drawn from the pattern rather than from a single verified transaction. The viewing counts are the shape of the effect, not a measured average.
The mechanic is simple enough to state in one sentence. Default marketing assumes the buyer will discover the strengths and overlook the weakness. In practice the buyer finds the weakness in the first ninety seconds — a long driveway, a T-junction facing, west sun, an awkward level change — and every subsequent minute is spent privately discounting for it. Leading with the objection and answering it removes the discount before it forms.
The honest arithmetic, stated as a model. If a $4M house left to default marketing typically clears somewhere in the region of 5% to 10% below a positioned campaign on the same property, that is $200,000 to $400,000. We are labelling that as an illustrative range and not as a measured effect, because no public dataset isolates marketing approach from the fifteen other variables moving at the same time. What the range is useful for is scale: it is not a rounding error, and it is considerably larger than what the campaign costs.
Neutral, then photographed — in that order. Reversing the two is the most common and most expensive sequencing error on this list.
Finding six — some plots are worth more as two products than as one.
There is a specific and under-considered exit for owners of large detached plots. Above a certain size a single-family house stops being the highest-value use of the land, because the pool of buyers who want — and can finance — one very large house is smaller than the pool who want two normal ones. At that point the plot is worth more to someone who will subdivide it than to anyone who will live in it.
The tell is a stalled conventional listing on a very large plotA detached plot well above the district's typical size, marketed as a single-family home, that draws viewings but no offers over an extended period. That is not usually a pricing problem. It is a product-market fit problem: the house is priced for a buyer profile that barely exists at that quantum.
Frontage is the constraint that decides it, not areaTotal plot area is what owners quote. Frontage is what determines whether two compliant houses can actually be laid out, along with setbacks, access, drainage and the prevailing envelope control for that specific site. A commonly cited working figure is around sixteen metres of frontage, but that is a rule of thumb, not a published threshold.
It is a qualified person's call, and it has to be made before you listSubdivision potential is assessed against URA's development control parameters for the specific plot by a qualified person. It is not something a marketing exercise can assert. Establishing it before the listing goes live changes who the property is shown to; establishing it after twelve months on market changes very little.
The buyer is different, so the entire campaign is differentA subdivision exit is usually a sale to a developer or a builder, not to a family. That is a different audience, a different set of documents, a different negotiation and often a different timeline. Repositioning mid-campaign is possible — but it means restarting.
One caution worth stating plainly, because this is the section of a sellers' report most likely to be over-read: most large plots do not qualify. Frontage, access, plot shape, the district's envelope control and the local development pattern all have to line up. The value of asking the question early is that the answer is cheap before you list and expensive afterwards.
Finding seven — the buyer pool under landed is thinning at the bottom.
One shift in the 2025 data deserves more attention than it gets, because it works directly against the entry-level landed seller. The share of landed purchases made by buyers coming out of HDB flats has fallen in each of the last three years.
Share of landed buyers coming from HDB
The classic entry route into landed — sell the flat, buy the terrace — is carrying less of the market each year. That is the demand side of the entry-level landed price band.
Share of landed home purchasers whose prior residence was an HDB flat. Industry research on 4Q2025 landed transactions.
Read together with the price series, this is coherent rather than contradictory. Landed prices rose 7.6% in 2025 while HDB upgraders fell from 14% of buyers to 11%. Prices went up and the cheapest buyer cohort got smaller — which means the growth was carried by buyers further up, not by more people entering at the bottom.
Median landed transaction, by property type · 4Q 2025
Property type
Transactions
Median price
Median PSF
Terrace
281
$4.22M
$2,264
Semi-detached
151
$6.38M
$1,874
Detached
59
$10.58M
$1,869
All landed, the quarter
491
—
—
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Island-wide medians for the fourth quarter of 2025. PSF here is on built-up reference area, not land area — it is not comparable with the land-PSF figures used in an area-level audit.
Median price against median PSF, by property type
The bars are what the house costs. The line is what each foot of it costs. They diverge, and the divergence is the same size-gradient effect that shows up in every landed dataset: bigger houses cost more in total and less per foot.
Terrace is 57% of the volume and the cheapest quantum, and its buyer cohort is the one shrinking. If you are selling at the entry end, you are selling into a thinner queue than you were two years ago.
Finding eight — three ways a landed house actually leaves.
Every exit looks obvious once it has happened. These three are presented as illustrative composites rather than as verified individual transactions, because that is what they are — but the three shapes between them cover most of what a landed sale actually does.
Three exit shapes
The rush sale
The reposition
The subdivision
The house
D15 corner terrace, recent rebuild
Detached, long driveway
Detached, ~8,000 sqft
Opening ask
$8.80M
Market
Market
Bank valuation
$8.50M
—
—
What happened
Closed at $7.45M in ~30 days
12+ months, ~100 viewings, no offer
12+ months conventional, no close
The change
None — speed was the objective
Led with the driveway, then solved it
Marketed as a subdivision site
Outcome
Fast exit, ~12% under ask
7 viewings, closed in weeks
Sold to a developer, one transaction
mastplan
Illustrative composites. Figures are indicative of the shape of each outcome and are not verified individual sales.
The rush sale is not a pricing lessonA house that clears roughly 12% under its opening ask in thirty days did not fail. It bought speed, and speed in a thin market is genuinely expensive. The lesson is that you should know which you are buying — price or time — before the listing goes live, not after month four.
The reposition is a filtering lessonA hundred viewings and no offer is not weak demand. It is unfiltered demand: the listing is attracting people the house was never going to suit. Seven viewings and a close is the same market, addressed correctly.
The subdivision is a product lessonNothing about the plot changed. What changed was which buyer the plot was described to. That is the whole of it, and it is the reason the question is worth asking before rather than after twelve months of the wrong campaign.
Finding nine — six things to settle before the listing goes live.
Most sellers list first and then react to what the market tells them. That sequence costs money in a liquid market and costs a great deal more in a thin one, because in a thin market the first ninety days are the entire pool — the buyers looking for your specific house at your specific quantum see it once, form a view, and move on. Everything below happens before the listing, in this order.
1
Pull the transacted comps, not the asking compsRecent caveat records for your street, your property type and your plot band, over the last twenty-four months. Not the listings. Finding four is what happens when the two get confused.
2
Identify your worst feature and decide how you will answer itLong driveway, T-junction facing, west sun, an awkward level change, a neighbour's extension. Every house has one. The buyer will find it in the first ninety seconds. Deciding in advance how it gets addressed is the single highest-leverage thing on this list.
3
Neutralise the interior, and photograph only afterPersonal items, religious articles, family photographs and accumulated furniture all make a room read smaller and read as someone else's. Reversing this order — photographing first, decluttering later — means your listing is permanently represented by its weakest images.
4
Ask whether the plot has a subdivision angleFor detached owners on larger plots, this is a question for a qualified person and it is cheap to ask before the listing. Finding six is the case for asking it early.
5
Get builder's numbers for the buyer's scenarios, not yoursMost landed buyers are pricing a renovation, an A&A or a rebuild into their offer. If you can hand them credible cost ranges and timelines for all three, you are removing the uncertainty they would otherwise price as a discount.
6
Decide your timeline before you decide your priceThese are the same decision. Flexibility on timing buys you room to price above the transacted band and wait for the right buyer. A hard deadline means pricing into the band and accepting the market's number. Choosing one deliberately is fine; drifting between them is what costs the most.
The most expensive mistake is not pricing too high or too low. It is drifting — listing high, waiting, cutting, waiting, cutting again, and arriving at the market's number anyway, nine months later, off a listing that now looks stale.
The through-line of this report
Landed rose 7.6% in 2025 — its fourth-best year of the last five, but its widest outperformance of non-landed in at least five years.
Cumulative landed growth since end-2020 is about 45% on URA's own annual figures. The commonly quoted 36% is what non-landed did.
Aggregate strength and individual liquidity are different variables. The absorption spread across districts and types is roughly fourteen to one.
Direction of switch decides whether waiting costs you or pays you. Switching down is the case where time is on the seller's side.
Asking prices in thin districts are anchors built from the listings that did not sell. Price against caveats.
The entry-level buyer cohort is shrinking — HDB upgraders fell from 16% of landed buyers in 2023 to 11% in 2025.
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How this report was built
Price figures are URA's published quarterly real estate statistics, read at full-year resolution for the landed and non-landed private residential price indices from 2021 through 2025. The rebased series is computed by compounding those published annual changes from a common base of 100 at 31 December 2020. Transaction counts for 2025 and the 4Q2025 medians by property type are from published industry research on landed transactions over the same period.
Full-year figures throughout, never quarterly — one strong quarter should not carry a five-year claim.
Absorption ratios are listings against transaction pace, expressed in months. They rank liquidity. They are not measured times-to-sell, and no public dataset publishes those.
Asking-premium percentages are directional. Sample size and observation window are not published for them, so the ordering is the finding.
The positioning arithmetic and the anchoring table are explicitly labelled illustrative models, with their assumptions stated on the figure.
The three exit outcomes are composites, not verified individual sales.
The main limitation is that this is a national read. Landed is not one market; it is several dozen small ones that happen to share a price index. Everything on this page is true at the aggregate and can be wrong about a specific street. The two things that move a seller's own number most — built-up area and where the plot sits on the size gradient within its own type — are not in any public dataset at all.
The house, not the index
Find out what your house is actually worth.
This report can rank districts and types. It cannot price your house — Finding four and Finding seven are both reasons why. Send us the street, the property type and the plot size and we'll come back with the transacted comps that actually apply, an absorption read for your specific cell, and a straight answer on whether the next twelve months are working for you or against you.
Your transacted comps, not asking compsAn absorption read for your cellSwitch up or wait — for your situationThe subdivision question, answeredA sequenced exit, with a timeline
Got it.
We'll come back to you shortly with your read.
About the figures Landed and non-landed price index changes are from URA's published quarterly real estate statistics for the full years 2021 to 2025 and are indicative as at publication, subject to revision by the relevant authorities. The rebased index series is computed by compounding those published annual changes from a base of 100 at 31 December 2020. Landed transaction counts, 4Q2025 medians by property type and buyer-profile shares are from published industry research on landed transactions. Absorption ratios are illustrative liquidity rankings computed from standing listings against transaction pace — they are ratios expressed in months, not measured times-to-sell. Asking-premium figures are directional and carry no published sample size or observation window. The anchoring table, the positioning arithmetic and the three exit outcomes are clearly-labelled illustrative models and composites, not measured results or verified individual transactions. Subdivision potential is assessed against the prevailing URA development control parameters for the specific plot and must be confirmed by a qualified person. Published for educational purposes; nothing here is a valuation, an offer, or financial advice. Please check with a professional before making any property decision. See our full Disclaimer.
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