Six in Ten Would Sell Part of Their Lease Back. The Rules Say Wait Until 65

The Straits Times reported this week on a set of retirement proposals from the charity Leap201, drawn up after a survey of 1,000 seniors aged 50 to 59 and discussed at a roundtable on 9 September.

The sample matters more than the proposals. Every respondent lived in a three-room flat. About 80% earned under $5,000 a month — below the median for full-time workers, which is why Leap201 treats them as lower income. According to the reporting, 64% felt under-prepared for retirement, worried about money, caregiving and whether their job would last.

These are not people with a portfolio. They have a flat, a CPF balance, and a decade or so of working life left. The flat is the plan.

The finding that gives the proposal its force: 60% of those surveyed said they would consider selling part of their flat's lease back to HDB to top up their retirement income — and were not yet eligible to do so.

The Lease Buyback Scheme opens at 65. The people who said yes are between 50 and 59. So Leap201 proposed lowering the eligibility age in phases, from 65 to 55.

As The Straits Times reported, chairman Michael Lien framed it as a question of runway rather than cash: give people HDB monetisation options earlier in life, and with them "more time to choose how much longer they work" — and whether, and where, to move. NUS Business School's Professor Sing Tien Foo, who was on the panel, put the property argument plainly — a flat's value at the tail end of its lease has already depreciated, so unlocking it earlier lets an owner capture more.

That last claim is a testable one. We hold the transaction record. So we tested it.

It is worth being precise, because the scheme is often described loosely as "selling your flat to HDB". It is not that.

Per the reporting, a household keeps a slice of the lease and sells the rest back to HDB. The retained slice runs from 15 to 35 years, in five-year steps, and must be long enough to cover the youngest owner to age 95. The proceeds go towards topping up the CPF Retirement Account.

Two consequences follow, and both bite. Once you have taken it up, you cannot sell the flat on the open market. If you need out early, you return the flat to HDB and take a refund on the lease that remains.

Take-up has been modest and stable. The Straits Times cites HDB figures from August 2024: an average of 1,680 households a year over the preceding five years, with the vast majority receiving between $100,000 and $300,000. By the end of 2024, 13,734 households had used it. IPS sociologist Tan Ern Ser's read on the low take-up is that seniors postpone retirement decisions — which is, in fairness, an argument for handing them the decision earlier.

We filtered our HDB resale caveats to three-room flats only — the survey's segment — and bucketed them by flat age, measured from lease commencement, which is how remaining lease is computed. This is 10,291 three-room resales lodged since 1 January 2025.

The headline gap is real. A three-room flat 40 years or older transacts at a median $566/sqft against $768/sqft for one under 10 — a little over a quarter less, on essentially the same median floor area.

That bottom row, though, lumps together flats that have just turned 40 and flats approaching 60. Split into five-year steps, the price keeps falling:

On these national medians the fall looks front-loaded: $161/sqft between the 10-to-19 and 30-to-39 bands, then $51 — about 9% — from the early 40s to the late 50s. Only three resales involved flats 60 or older, too few to report.

But the oldest flats are not spread evenly across Singapore. Of three-room resales where the flat was 50 to 59 years old, 78.2% were in five central, mature towns — Toa Payoh, Queenstown, Geylang, Kallang/Whampoa and Bukit Merah — where location props up the price. Compare flats in the same town and the flattening disappears. These are the four towns with at least 30 resales at both ages, by median price per square foot:

Pooled, flats roughly 15 years older in the same town sell about 18% lower, or about 1.4% a year of flat age. Run the same test on the earlier stretch, flats aged 10 to 19 against 30 to 39 across the six towns where both are common, and it works out to about 0.8% a year. Different towns carry each comparison, so we read that as "at least as fast", not as proof that the fall speeds up. Most of the fall on the national table comes before 40; compared like for like, it keeps going at least as fast after.

Overwhelmingly, and increasingly so. This is the share of three-room resale volume by flat age, year by year:

In 2022, flats 40 years or older were 45.8% of three-room resales. By 2025 — a complete year — they were 63.2%. In 2026 so far they are 64.5%, the largest single band by a distance.

A caution on reading this: a rising share of old flats can mean buyers moved towards them, or simply that a very large 1970s and 1980s three-room cohort crossed the 40-year line. Volume share alone cannot separate the two, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does establish is the shape of the segment — when a three-room flat trades in Singapore today, it is usually an old one.

Put the tables together and the case for age 55 changes shape.

Professor Sing's argument is that waiting means monetising a more depreciated asset. That is true in the broad sweep — a little over a quarter less per square foot between flats under 10 and flats 40 or older is not nothing.

It also holds up for the specific people Leap201 surveyed. On raw medians the decline seems to ease once a flat passes 40, and most three-room flats changing hands are already past 40 — 64.5% of them this year. Read that way, the damage is largely done. Compared town by town, it is not: in the same town, each extra year of flat age past 40 goes with a price per square foot roughly 1.4% lower, at least as steep as the stretch before 40.

So a 55-year-old in an old three-room flat is not standing at the top of a cliff — but they are on a slope that is still running. On our cross-section, ten more years of flat age past 40 means about 13% less per square foot in the same town. That is not a collapse. It is a steady, real cost of waiting.

None of that makes price the whole case. The honest case for opening the scheme at 55 is not "your flat is about to collapse in value." It is still mostly Lien's case, and Tan's: time, sequencing, and the ability to decide while you are still healthy enough to choose where you age — with a slow, real cost of waiting added on top. Whether acting at 55 would actually capture more of that value is a separate question, and the scheme's own rules make it a harder one than it sounds.

This one is not in our data — it falls out of the scheme's own rules as The Straits Times describes them, and we flag it as our reading rather than anyone's finding.

The retained lease must cover the youngest owner to 95, and the menu runs from 15 to 35 years. A 65-year-old needs 30 years of cover, comfortably inside the menu. A 60-year-old needs 35 — exactly the maximum. A 55-year-old needs 40 years, which the current menu does not offer.

So lowering the age to 55 is not a switch that can simply be flipped. Either the retention menu has to stretch past 35 years, or the age-95 rule has to give.

There is a second-order effect worth naming too. Because the age-95 rule scales with the owner's age, dropping eligibility by ten years also raises the lease a household must keep by ten years. The slice actually sold is not obviously bigger — and it sits ten years further into the future, which is not how present value works in your favour. Whether a 55-year-old would genuinely receive more than they would at 65 depends on HDB's valuation method, which the reporting does not set out and which we are not going to guess at. We flag it as an open question, not a debunking.

Look again at the 20-to-29-year band: $650k median, $974/sqft — the most expensive row on the table, sitting in the middle of a supposedly downward slope.

We are not going to smooth that away. It rests on 48 resales, against 6,556 in the oldest band, and three-room flats completed in that window are scarce and concentrated. It is a thin, unrepresentative pocket. But it is also a working demonstration of the caveat that governs this entire piece: these bands mix towns, storeys and layouts, so they measure more than lease decay.

Three further limits, stated plainly:

• This is a cross-section, not a life story. We are comparing different flats in different towns at one moment. It does not track what any single flat does as it ages, and no owner should read the table as a forecast of their own address. The same goes for the per-year figures: they describe how prices differ between older and younger flats today, not how any one flat's price will move.
• Older three-room flats sit disproportionately in mature estates, where location commands a premium. That premium works against the age gap in the national table, which is why we compared the oldest flats town by town above — and why the like-for-like slope past 40 is steeper than the national medians show. Even the same-town comparison is closer to like for like, not identical: blocks built decades apart also differ in layout, storey and finish.
• 2026 is partial and under-lodged. We lean on 2025, a complete year, for the trend claim.

And the largest caveat of all: the Lease Buyback Scheme is not a resale. HDB buys a defined tail of lease on its own valuation basis. Our resale medians describe the asset's trajectory. They do not predict anyone's LBS proceeds, and we make no claim that they do.

No. Lowering the age to 55 is a proposal from the charity Leap201, not a rule change — and the proposals are still headed for a white paper due in the fourth quarter of 2026, after which the charity says it will keep engaging agencies on possible pilots. Nothing about today's eligibility has changed.

What does exist for the 55-to-64 group, per the reporting: right-sizing with the Silver Housing Bonus, worth up to $40,000 in cash, or applying for a community care apartment. Leap201's second housing proposal is a smoother path between the two — letting an owner who has taken up the Lease Buyback Scheme transfer their remaining lease into a community care apartment, which they cannot do today.

Not on the open market. As The Straits Times sets out, flat owners who take up the scheme cannot sell on the resale market afterwards. If they want to end the arrangement early, they return the flat to HDB and receive a refund for the lease still remaining.

This is the lock-in Professor Sing raised at the roundtable, and it is the part worth thinking hardest about before signing. Health changes. A household that is comfortable at 65 may need to downsize at 78, and the scheme as it stands does not leave that door open in the way an ordinary resale would. It is also why Leap201's transfer-to-a-community-care-apartment proposal is arguably the more consequential of its two housing asks, even though the age change got the headline.

The news, the survey findings, the scheme mechanics and every quoted expert come from The Straits Times' report of 9 September 2026, linked below. We did not attend the roundtable and we have not seen Leap201's underlying survey instrument — the 1,000-respondent sample, the 60% and 64% figures and the income profile are the charity's, reported by The Straits Times, not ours.

The price and volume tables are PropKaki's own, computed from public.hdb_transactions — HDB resale caveats — filtered to three-room flats and bucketed by flat age, where age is the transaction year minus the lease commencement year. Data as of 1 September 2026. The price tables cover 10,291 three-room resales lodged since 1 January 2025; bands with fewer than 30 resales are omitted. The same-town comparison uses those same resales, keeps only towns with at least 30 resales at both ages, and pools the towns, weighting each by its smaller sample; the yearly rate divides each price gap by the gap in median flat age between the two groups. Prices are gross transacted resale prices, before any resale levy, commission or fees. The age-95 and retention-menu arithmetic in the section above is our own reading of the scheme parameters as reported, not a figure from HDB.

• Charity proposes lower age eligibility for Lease Buyback Scheme, one-stop retirement planning platform — The Straits Times, 9 September 2026. The roundtable, the Leap201 survey, the scheme mechanics, HDB's take-up figures and the comments from Michael Lien, Professor Sing Tien Foo and Tan Ern Ser.
• PropKaki — public.hdb_transactions (HDB resale caveats), three-room flats bucketed by flat age, with the 40-and-older band split into five-year steps and compared town by town. As of 1 September 2026.

This is opinion and analysis from the PropKaki Editorial Desk, not financial, legal or housing advice. The reporting and the survey findings belong to The Straits Times and Leap201 respectively; the resale analysis, the reading of the age-95 arithmetic and the conclusions drawn from both are ours, and we have set out the limits of each above.

The Lease Buyback Scheme is a long, largely irreversible decision about the main asset most Singaporean households own. Nothing here is a recommendation to take it up or to leave it alone. If you are weighing it, speak to HDB directly and, where the sums are material, to an independent adviser who can see your full CPF and cash position.