Bayshore Palms BTO Review: The Bayshore Twin With No 3-Room, a Lower 4-Room Range and Two More Months to Wait

Bayshore Palms is the Bayshore project for a 4-room household willing to give HDB two more months for a lower price list. It had nothing for a household that needed a 3-room, and it was not the cheapest Plus 4-room in Bedok.

HDB launched Palms and Bayshore Vista together in October 2024 as the first two BTO projects in Bedok's new Bayshore estate. Applications closed on 23 October 2024 and every booking appointment has long since passed. We are writing in September 2026 for three readers: households waiting for their Palms keys, future resale buyers who would inherit its rules, and families weighing Bedok's next launch.

The 4-room: on paper, Palms was the better half of the pair. Both projects are Plus, both carry a 7% subsidy recovery, both 4-rooms are 89 sqm and sold without floor finishes, both sit in the gazetted Bayshore car-lite area, and HDB printed the same resale comparables band for both. Two things differ. Palms' 4-room ran from $495,000 to $683,000 before grants and Vista's from $514,000 to $694,000, so Palms was lower at both ends of the range. And HDB estimated 47 months at Palms against 45 at Vista. A lower range on identical terms, for an estimate two months longer, is a trade we would have taken.

Not the cheapest in Bedok. Kembangan Wave, the third Bedok project in the October 2024 BTO exercise, priced its 4-room at $453,000 to $592,000, estimated 41 months and set a subsidy recovery of 6%. HDB's stated reason for charging the two Bayshore projects more on resale is that they "are more favourably located near East Coast Park and a proposed sports and recreation facility". Whether that setting is worth the difference to you is a judgement about the place, and no price table can make it for you.

No 3-room at all. Palms offered 2-room Flexi and 4-room flats only; in Bedok's October 2024 list, only Vista had 3-rooms.

What this review cannot tell you. HDB's application-rate results page for October 2024 is no longer online, and the Internet Archive holds no copy of its figures. This review therefore carries no application rates, and it does not try to judge from anything else how crowded a Palms queue was.

Our call. If you are waiting for a Palms 4-room, you hold the lower-priced half of the Bayshore pair, range for range, on the same terms; plan now for a car-lite precinct, a 10-year minimum occupation period (MOP) and HDB's 7% whenever you first sell. If you are weighing Bedok's November 2026 flats, HDB has not said where they are or how they will be classified, so read Palms as evidence of what a Bayshore Plus 4-room asked in 2024, not as a forecast.

Source: HDB's October 2024 launch release and price list (Annex B), and the Bayshore Palms sales brochure.

Source: HDB's October 2024 price list (Annex B), 99-year leases, before grants, the resale levy and HDB's "additional payments (if any)". The per-sqm column is ours: each range's midpoint divided by the size with the air-con ledge.

• A 4-room project with a 2-room Flexi corner. More than three in every four flats for sale are 4-rooms. On HDB's site plan, Blocks 914A and 916A hold every 2-room Flexi flat and all 40 rental flats, alongside some 4-rooms; Blocks 915A, 915B and 916B are 4-room only. For the rental flats HDB gives a number and a location and nothing else, and this review reads nothing into them.
• HDB's own words on the flats. "Residential units in Bayshore Palms are designed without beams within the internal spaces (living room and bedrooms), which results in a consistent headroom instead of having lower headroom at areas with beams." And: "To optimise views toward the parks, some of the 4-room flats at Bayshore Palms will also be provided with full-height windows." The floor plans mark which windows are full height, so check the plan for your unit. The larger 2-room Flexi has a flexible space that the brochure suggests for "dining, a study or to place an extra bed".
• What comes fitted, and what is extra. Kitchen, bathroom and household-shelter tiles and the WC come as standard; in a 2-room Flexi HDB adds a sliding partition or door for the bedroom and a folding door to the bathroom, plus grab bars where the lease is short. Living-room and bedroom flooring, the 4-room's internal doors, and the wash basin and shower set are optional items (kitchen cabinets are offered only to short-lease 2-room Flexi buyers): opt in to the Optional Component Scheme (OCS) and "the cost of the optional components will be added to the price of the flat", or leave them to your own contractor. Our renovation guide sets out what the OCS covers.
• In the project. A 2-storey social and commercial block with an eating house and a preschool; more shops on the first storey of Block 916B; 3-Generation playgrounds on the ground floor and on the roof garden of the social and commercial block; sky terraces and roof gardens on the 9th storey of two residential blocks; and, on top of the multi-storey car park, a garden with a fitness corner, a community garden and an open lawn. All of it, the brochure notes, is open to the public as well as to residents.
• Getting about, as HDB puts it. "Bayshore Palms residents will be served by bus services, Bayshore MRT station, and the upcoming Bedok South MRT station", and the project sits on a Transit Priority Corridor, "a pedestrian-friendly bus-only street". No walking time is printed for any of these, so we quote none.

Three flats in four at Palms are 4-rooms, all 89 sqm and all sold basic: this is a project priced and planned around the 4-room household.

Bedok had three BTO projects in October 2024, all of them Plus. Set side by side:

Source: HDB's October 2024 price list (Annex B) and launch release (subsidy recovery, Table 2). All three 4-rooms are 89 sqm, and none of the three projects included floor finishes, internal doors or sanitary fittings in its prices, so the three 4-room ranges can be read straight across.

• The same flat on the same terms. Palms and Vista share the Plus rules, the 7% subsidy recovery and HDB's reason for it, the 89 sqm 4-room sold basic, the gazetted Bayshore car-lite area, the brochure's line about flats designed without beams, and full-height windows in some 4-rooms. HDB printed the same comparables band for both 4-rooms, flats that changed hands at $815,000 to $930,000.
• Where Palms' list sat lower. $495,000 against $514,000 at the bottom of the 4-room range, and $683,000 against $694,000 at the dearer end. Its 2-room Flexi flats started lower than Vista's as well.
• What Palms cost you. HDB's estimate: 47 months against 45. Both are HDB estimates, running from the median month of flat selection to the median projected completion month of each project's blocks.
• What Palms could not offer. A 3-room. Vista sold them and Palms did not, so a Bayshore household that needed the middle size had one project to apply to.
• Different lists of amenities. Palms' brochure lists its own eating house, preschool, shops and 3-Generation playgrounds. Vista's lists a supermarket and an eating house beneath its blocks facing the street, a preschool and a residents' network centre. Palms has 40 rental flats in two blocks; Vista's brochure lists 20 in one. HDB's Palms site plan draws Bayshore Vista on the far side of Bayshore Drive, which the plan marks as a future bus-only corridor; the plan prints no distance and we state none.
• Kembangan Wave, Bedok's lower-priced Plus option. Its 4-room range was lower at both ends, its estimate shorter at 41 months and its subsidy recovery 6% rather than 7%, in a smaller project of 348 flats. HDB explained the Bayshore projects' higher subsidy recovery in location terms, in the sentence quoted in our verdict. Palms' site plan also marks a "site reserved for sports & recreation" on the far side of Bayshore Street; HDB does not say whether that is the facility its release refers to.
• HDB's shared Bedok row. HDB's starting-price table in the launch release prints one Bedok Plus row for all three projects. Its 2-room Flexi, from $190,000 or $70,000 after a $120,000 grant, and its 4-room, from $453,000 or $398,000 after $55,000, are both Kembangan Wave's prices; the row's 3-room price is Vista's, since neither Palms nor Kembangan Wave sold 3-rooms. Palms' own lowest prices were $199,000 and $495,000.

Between the Bayshore twins, Palms asked less for the same 4-room on the same terms; what it asked in return was two months of HDB's estimate, and a household that needed a 3-room had to look to Vista.

October 2024 was HDB's first exercise under the Standard, Plus and Prime framework, so Palms' applicants were among the first to buy under the Plus rules below. HDB set subsidy recovery project by project: 7% for Palms and Vista, 6% for Kembangan Wave and Central Trio @ AMK, 8% for Merpati Alcove, Kallang View and Towner Breeze, and 9% for Crawford Heights, the one Prime project in the October 2024 BTO exercise. Of the later Plus projects, Oak Ville @ AMK also carries 7%; the rates HDB set from October 2025 to June 2026 are listed in our prices guide.

• The day you first sell. You pay HDB 7% of the resale price or the valuation, whichever is higher: $7,000 on every $100,000, or $70,000 on every $1,000,000. HDB collects it at the first sale, whenever that comes, and owning the flat for longer does not reduce it. What a Palms flat might sell for is not something we estimate.
• How long before you can sell. Ten years from the day you collect the keys, twice a Standard flat's five.
• Letting. The whole flat can never be let, not even once the ten years are up, and the ban passes to anyone who buys it from you. Spare bedrooms are another matter: in a 4-room, an owner who is a Singapore Citizen or Permanent Resident can let them with HDB's approval, MOP or no MOP. The 2-room Flexi is shut out of that too, since HDB permits bedroom letting only from the 3-room size up.
• What your buyer must clear. Your buyer has to pass HDB's income test for a resale Plus flat whether or not they take a grant: on HDB's current figures, for eligibility letters sought from 24 August 2026, a family must earn no more than $16,000 a month (an extended family $24,000), and a single of 35 or more who takes no Singles Grant no more than $16,000. The buyer's own 10-year MOP then begins; our MOP guide explains how it is counted.

Plus flats come with more subsidy than Standard ones, and these rules are the other side of that bargain. A household that expects to move on inside a decade of collecting the keys, or hopes to let the whole flat some day, was never the one either Bayshore project was designed for.

Buying from Palms' lower price list did not buy a lower rate: HDB's 7% is reckoned on the resale price or the valuation, whichever is higher, never on what you paid.

HDB sizes the Enhanced CPF Housing Grant (EHG) on what your household earned, on average, in the 12 months before you asked for your HFE letter: $120,000 at the top of the scale, for first-timer families on $1,500 a month or less, falling to nothing once income passes $9,000. HDB had raised the maximum from $80,000 to $120,000 for families, and from $40,000 to $60,000 for singles, in an announcement on 20 August 2024, before this exercise opened. Applied to Palms' lowest prices:

Source: our sums on HDB's first-timer family EHG bands and Palms' cheapest units. HDB pays the full grant only if the lease runs until the youngest buyer turns 95.

And under HDB's loan test:

Our loan sums follow HDB's rules: HDB lends 75% of the price, repaid over 25 years, sized at HDB's 3.0% test rate, with the instalment kept within 30% of monthly income. This exercise was the first with the 75% limit; HDB had allowed 80% before. Any grant shrinks the loan, and HDB charges less interest than the 3.0% it tests at.

• HDB's Bedok headline is not Palms'. HDB's starting-price table printed one Bedok Plus row. Its 4-room, from $453,000 or $398,000 after an assumed $55,000 grant, and its 2-room Flexi, from $190,000 or $70,000 after $120,000, are both Kembangan Wave's prices (the row's 3-room price is Vista's), and HDB calls the after-grant figures illustrative.
• HDB's income ladder names no Palms flat. HDB's launch release matched household incomes to flats a buyer could service from CPF "with little or no cash payment", at the prices flats typically sold for. At $7,000 a month it named 4-room Plus flats at Kembangan Wave and Central Trio @ AMK only; at $9,000 it said "most of the Standard, Plus and Prime flats", naming no project. For a single earning $3,000, its one Plus 2-room Flexi was Kembangan Wave's.
• Old ceilings, new ceilings. Palms' applicants had to earn no more than $14,000 a month for a 4-room, $7,000 for a 99-year 2-room Flexi, or $21,000 as an extended family. HDB has since lifted those to $16,000, $8,000 and $24,000, for eligibility letters sought from 24 August 2026.
• Singles. From this exercise, HDB let eligible first-timer singles apply for new 2-room Flexi flats "across all locations where such flats are available"; before, they were limited to projects in non-mature estates. Singles, who must be 35 or over, pay HDB's additional $15,000, so the cheapest Palms 2-room Flexi becomes $214,000: $174,000 after the singles' EHG on an income of $2,000 a month (EHG $40,000), $189,000 at $3,000 (EHG $25,000) and $204,000 at $4,000 (EHG $10,000). The singles' grant peaks at $60,000 and ends once your own income passes $4,500.
• Seniors. From age 55, buyers could choose a 2-room Flexi on a lease of 15 to 45 years, so long as it lasted until every buyer and spouse reached 95: $67,000 to $85,000 (Type 1) and $86,000 to $109,000 (Type 2) on 15 years, up to $119,000 to $151,000 and $154,000 to $195,000 on 45 years.

Start a Palms budget from $495,000 for a 4-room and $199,000 for a 2-room Flexi; the lower Bedok figures in HDB's headline table belong to Kembangan Wave.

• What the figure is. HDB's estimated waiting time runs from the median month of flat selection to the median projected completion month of the project's blocks. For Palms it is 47 months, a month short of four years.
• Where it sits. HDB's Shorter Waiting Time label needs an estimate under 36 months, and Palms is well past it. In October 2024 HDB named those as Fernvale Oasis, Fernvale Sails and West BrickVille @ Bukit Batok, with Costa Riviera I & II at "slightly over 3 years". Among Bedok's three projects, Palms had the longest estimate (Vista 45, Kembangan Wave 41). Elsewhere in the October 2024 BTO exercise, Central Trio @ AMK (59), Taman Jurong Skyline (52), Crawford Heights (50) and Towner Breeze (48) were longer.
• The missing date. HDB published no completion date for Palms, and we do not add 47 months to anything to make one. Owners who have booked get a Probable Completion Date on MyHDB Page instead, and it can shift as building goes on; the difference between that date and the launch estimate is set out in our wait-times guide.
• Keys before facilities. The site-plan notes warn that "the residential blocks may be completed ahead of the proposed precinct facilities, so that flat buyers are able to collect the keys to their new homes earlier." In an estate still being built, some of what the brochure describes may arrive after you do.
• The longer clock. The 10-year MOP starts at key collection, so on HDB's estimate roughly fourteen years separate the median month of flat selection from the first day a Palms flat can be sold.
• Second thoughts before the keys. Pulling out between booking and the Agreement for Lease forfeits the option fee, $500 on a 2-room Flexi or $2,000 on a 4-room; pulling out once the Agreement is signed costs 5% of the price in its place. Both routes also bar you from applying for a year. Our step-by-step application guide walks through each stage.

The two months between Palms and Vista are small beside the decade that follows the keys; plan around the second number, not the first.

Everything in this section is about other people's flats: Palms is still unbuilt, nobody has resold one, and it has neither a resale price nor a rent.

HDB's own comparables. Beside each flat type, HDB's price list printed a band of nearby resale deals of its own choosing. For the 2-room Flexi it had "none nearby":

Source: HDB's October 2024 price list (Annex B); we worked out the gap. HDB's own caution: "The differences in attributes between the resale comparables and the new flats should be taken into account when making a comparison."

HDB printed the same comparables band for Bayshore Vista's 4-room; with its higher range, Vista's gap was a shade narrower. Even Palms' dearest 4-room sat below the bottom of HDB's comparables band.

Resale flats across Bedok, July 2025 to June 2026:

Source: our count of HDB's Bedok resale registrations. None of these is a Palms flat.

• The all-ages median sits inside Palms' range. Bedok's median 4-room resale, $585,000 across 463 resales, falls between Palms' $495,000 and $683,000; only 84 of them had leases starting in 2015 or later. That median mostly describes flats whose leases began before 2015, while a Palms flat starts at 99 years.
• The young-flat median describes other estates. Those 84 younger 4-rooms, median $878,000, clustered on Bedok North Street 4, Bedok North Road and Bedok South Road. Bayshore has no street in that list; the median describes those neighbourhoods and says nothing about Bayshore.
• Small flats barely trade. Bedok had 20 2-room resales in the year, at a median of $325,000, and only 1 on a lease from 2015.

At launch, a Palms 4-room cost about what an older Bedok 4-room changed hands for in the year to June 2026; what the BTO offers on top is a fresh 99-year lease in a new estate, with Plus terms attached.

HDB's brochure is plain about it: "Bayshore Palms will be one such car-lite precinct. It is located near Bayshore MRT station and the upcoming Bedok South MRT station within the gazetted Bayshore car-lite area." It says the precinct is designed for residents "to adopt green modes of commuting", with parking reduced "to free up space for public facilities and greenery". What that means for a car owner, as HDB sets it out:

• Season parking is for residents only, and scarcer. "Season parking will be reduced and restricted to residents only." Sales are first come, first served and subject to availability, and non-residents are pointed to car parks outside the precinct.
• The first car comes first. A resident's first car has priority over a second or later one, and a second or later car pays a higher season rate, pegged to HDB's Tier 2 Restricted Zone rate and subject to availability.
• Visitors. Short-term parking stays, "albeit with limited lots", and HDB says the charges may be adjusted based on demand.
• What HDB offers instead. Bus services, Bayshore MRT station, the upcoming Bedok South MRT station and the Transit Priority Corridor; the brochure also lists bicycle stands and describes walking and cycling paths planned across the Bayshore estate. It gives no walking times, and we add none.

Bayshore Vista's brochure sets out the same car-lite rules, so on parking there was nothing to choose between the twins.

For a one-car household, the first car has priority, though season parking is reduced and sold subject to availability; for a two-car household, the second car is the one HDB serves last and charges more.

• Bedok's October 2025 launch. Ping Yi Court, HDB's next Bedok project, was Standard: 862 flats, a 33-month estimate, and a 4-room range of $498,000 to $624,000 that included floor finishes, internal doors and sanitary fittings. Palms sells those as options, so the two starting prices are not like for like, and its 4-room is larger; on HDB's own without-finishes figure, Ping Yi Court's 4-room started below Palms'. Its terms were Standard ones: five years to the MOP, the whole flat lettable afterwards by a citizen owner with HDB's approval, and no subsidy recovery on sale. It launched a year after Palms, so it says nothing about how Palms' applicants chose; it shows what Bedok offered next.
• Bedok in November 2026. HDB expects about 7,960 flats in its November exercise, spread across Bedok, Geylang, Sembawang, Tengah, Toa Payoh and Yishun. HDB's Flat Portal shows two provisional Bedok batches: 1,640 flats in 2-room Flexi, 3-room and 4-room types, and 860 in 2-room Flexi and 4-room types. Project names and classifications are announced on launch day and not before, so nobody outside HDB can yet say whether either batch is in Bayshore or is Plus; dates are tracked in our launch schedule.
• If the next flats are Standard. In October 2024 HDB said Standard projects set aside "at least 95% of the 4-room and bigger flats" for first-timer families, and it raised the second-timer share from July 2025. As HDB sets out its ballot today, a second-timer family has one chance, a first-timer family two, and a family in the First-Timer (Parents & Married Couples) group three. First-timer families who have failed in at least two tries for Standard flats earn an extra chance each time they try for a Standard flat again, to a ceiling of five (Parents & Married Couples) or four; a try for a Plus flat does not count towards it.
• HDB's own advice. In its June 2026 release HDB suggested you "consider applying to projects with lower application rates, such as those with an application rate of around one or lower"; the rates for later exercises are in BTO application rates and results.
• An SBF. HDB's Sale of Balance Flats sells units that earlier launches did not place. February 2026 brought 4,320 of them, and by 18 September 2026 no further round had been announced; our SBF guide shows how the last one worked.
• Resale. Bedok's resale market, in the table above, comes with keys now. A Palms flat itself cannot be resold until its owner has met the 10-year MOP, and whoever buys it then takes on the Plus rules.

Palms' price list records what a Bayshore Plus 4-room asked in 2024; nothing HDB has published yet says what November's Bedok flats will cost, where they will stand, or on what terms.

The documents behind each figure. HDB's October 2024 launch release (the framework notes, the Enhanced CPF Housing Grant increase, the loan limit, the Shorter Waiting Time projects, subsidy recovery by project and HDB's reasons in Table 2, its starting-price table and its income ladder) and its Annex B price list (flats, prices, short-lease prices, the estimated waiting time and HDB's resale comparables); the Bayshore Palms sales brochure (setting, blocks, storeys, rental flats, facilities, transport, car-lite rules, finishes and the site plan, which we read on the rendered page); the Bayshore Vista and Kembangan Wave brochures and price rows, for the comparison only; PropKaki's property_rules for the EHG bands, income ceilings, ballot chances, the MOP and HDB's letting rules; HDB's preliminary list for the November 2026 exercise and its SBF announcements; Ping Yi Court's October 2025 price row, as later context only; and PropKaki's analysis of HDB resale registrations in Bedok, July 2025 to June 2026.

The sums. Per-sqm prices divide each range's midpoint by the size including the air-con ledge. The comparables gap sets midpoint against midpoint. Loan figures assume HDB lends 75% over 25 years, sized at its 3.0% test rate, with the instalment capped at 30% of income. Grant rows subtract HDB's EHG bands from Palms' cheapest units. The subsidy-recovery sums are 7% of $100,000 and of $1,000,000.

Deliberately left out. No application rates, for the reason given in our verdict, and no estimate of demand drawn from anything else. No completion date or year: HDB publishes none, and adding 47 months to a selection month would be an inference. No resale price, rent or return for Palms, which has not been built or resold; every resale figure here describes other flats. No forecast of prices, rents or future application rates. This is a desktop review of HDB's documents and data, not a site or showflat visit. Grant figures are illustrations, and your HFE letter decides your grant and loan. None of this is financial advice: verify every figure and rule with HDB.