Older Flats Really Are Taking Over the Resale Market — but Not for the Reason Everyone Gives

A couple has spent four months looking at flats around fifteen years old. They know the price band by heart now — the shortlist, the disappointments, the one that went for twenty thousand over ask on the same afternoon they viewed it.

Then an agent talks them into seeing something older, on a street they had written off. Third floor of a block that went up before either of them was born. The lift lobby is tired. The corridor is wide in a way nothing built since is wide, and there is a mature tree outside the kitchen window that is taller than the block.

And the number is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars lower than everything else they have seen this month.

They talk about it all the way home. The lease, obviously. What happens at the end. Whether their parents will say something. But the arithmetic keeps pulling in one direction, and by the weekend they have made an offer.

Multiply that scene enough times and it shows up in the national statistics — which is exactly what has happened.

We took every HDB resale caveat we hold, computed each flat's age as the transaction year minus its lease commencement year, and bucketed the volume by age, year by year.

The report is right. The 40-and-older band has gone from 18.4% to 28.2% in four years, and it is now the largest single band by a clear margin. Meanwhile the under-10 band has fallen from 27.4% to 19.3%.

That is a genuine, sizeable shift in what Singaporeans are buying, visible in four consecutive years of data. The 2026 figure is year-to-date and under-lodged, so treat it as a running picture rather than a settled full-year number — but the direction has been consistent for long enough that the trend is not a lodgement artefact.

This is where we part company with the explanation.

The reasoning offered is that with fewer large flats being built, buyers are prioritising affordability and space, and older flats deliver both. The Yishun example — a spacious 104 sqm four-room — is chosen to make exactly that point.

Here is what the median actually looks like across 42,905 resales lodged since January 2025:

The 40-and-older band has the smallest median size of any band — 797 sqft. The most spacious band is 20 to 29 years, at 1,184 sqft, nearly four hundred square feet larger.

That is not a subtle difference, and it makes sense once you think about what was built when. The generous, big-layout HDB stock is largely the 1990s and early-2000s cohort — now twenty to thirty-five years old. Go back past forty years and you are into a lot of three-room and smaller flats. Part of the gap is simply which flat types each band holds: only 48 of the 8,878 resales in the 20-to-29-year band were three-room flats.

So the space story is real. It is just a story about 20-to-39-year-old flats, not about the 40-plus band that is actually gaining share. The Yishun flat in the report is a genuine bargain and a striking one — its $265,000 price is well below the $470k median for its band — but a 104 sqm four-room is not what the typical 40-plus resale looks like.

Look down the $/sqft column again, because it is the most interesting thing in the table — and, read on its own, the most misleading.

• Under 10 years: $724
• 10–19 years: $717
• 20–29 years: $557
• 30–39 years: $557
• 40 years and older: $562

Taken at face value, that is one cliff between the 10-to-19 and 20-to-29 bands, then a flat line — as if age stops setting the price after about twenty years. That reading does not survive a fairer comparison.

The national bands are not like-for-like. The oldest band is mostly three-room flats, and its oldest flats sit mostly in central, mature towns: 75.8% of resales of flats aged 50 to 59 were in Toa Payoh, Bukit Merah, Queenstown, Kallang/Whampoa and Geylang, whose location premium props up the national medians. Fixing the flat type alone does not solve it — nationally, a four-room flat aged 45 to 49 still sells at $553 per square foot, against $564 at 20 to 29. So we compared the same flat type in the same town, in towns with at least 30 resales in both bands:

The drop at around twenty years is real, if smaller than it looks nationally. The flattening is not. In the same town, a four-room flat aged 45 to 49 sold for about a quarter less per square foot than one aged 20 to 29, in all five towns with enough sales to compare — in Bedok, $677 against $538, on 116 and 297 resales.

The pattern holds beyond four-room flats, and beyond storey. Nationally, five-room flats aged 45 to 49 sell above 20-to-29-year-olds per square foot (+5.9%); in the same town, across the three towns that allow the comparison, they sold for 25.0% less. Three-room flats keep falling past forty: −17.8% from the 40–44 band to the 55–59 band in the same town, against −8.9% nationally. And matched on storey range as well as town, the older four-room flat was cheaper in all 39 comparisons between the 20–29 and 40–44 bands.

So the honest shape is a drop, then a slope: in the same town, about 1% less per square foot for each extra year of flat age (−1.0% a year for four-room flats between the 20–29 and 40–44 bands). The market is pricing age through the middle of a flat's life; the national medians hide it because the oldest flats sit in some of the priciest towns.

There are two mechanisms, and volume share cannot separate them.

The first is the one everyone reaches for: buyers changing their minds. That is clearly happening in part — a hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a persuasive argument, and cost pressure has been real.

The second is duller and probably larger. Singapore's HDB stock is ageing. A flat that was 38 in 2023 is 41 now. Every year, a cohort crosses into the 40-plus band and stays there, and the pool of flats that can be sold as 40-plus grows mechanically — no change in anyone's preferences required.

You can see the same effect further up the table. The 10-to-19 band nearly doubled its share, from 8.6% to 15.5%, over the same four years. Nobody is arguing that buyers suddenly developed a taste for fifteen-year-old flats. Those are the big BTO cohorts of the 2010s coming through their minimum occupation period and reaching the resale market.

When two bands rise, the others must fall, and the under-10 band's slide from 27.4% to 19.3% is the mirror image: fewer recently-MOP flats available relative to everything else.

So the fair reading is that both things are true, and the ageing of the stock is doing a lot of the work that gets attributed to changing taste.

It depends on which version of the argument convinced you.

If the case is price, the data supports it. The 40-plus band's median is $470k against $710k for flats under ten years old. Part of that gap is size — older flats tend to be smaller — but not all of it: the same flat type in the same town also costs less per square foot when it is older. For a household that would otherwise stretch, that is the difference between comfortable and not.

If the case is space, the data does not support it. The 40-plus band has the smallest median size of any band at 797 sqft. The 20-to-29-year band's lead, at 1,184 sqft, is largely flat-type mix; within a single flat type the roomiest layouts are 30 to 39 years old — a median 1,119 sqft for four-room flats that age, against 1,066 sqft at 20 to 29 and 990 sqft at 45 to 49.

And if the case is value per square foot, be clear about what the discount buys. In the same town, a four-room flat aged 45 to 49 sold for about 25% less per square foot than one aged 20 to 29. That is not a bargain the market has missed; it comes with roughly two decades less lease. A younger flat costs more per square foot and gives you more lease; an older one costs less and gives you less.

So the useful question is how long you plan to stay and how you will finance the purchase. For a home you will live in for a decade or two, a lower price today can be the right trade. For a flat you may need to sell or refinance sooner, the shorter lease is part of what you are saving on — and the next buyer will weigh it too.

We can tell you what has happened to volume and price levels over the last four years. We cannot tell you what a flat with 30 years of lease left will be worth in 2040, and neither can anyone else.

What this data does establish is narrower and still useful: buyers today are already discounting for age in the middle of the lease. Within the same town and flat type, the older flat sells for less per square foot at almost every step of age we can measure — roughly 1% less per extra year. The national medians hide this because the oldest flats sit in pricier central towns. And the discount builds gradually across the ages at which most resales happen; it does not hold flat and then open up all at once.

Whether that continues as those flats age further is a different question. The considerations that tighten as a lease runs down — CPF usage limits, loan tenure, the buyer pool that can finance it — are structural, and they bite hardest at the short end, beyond where most of the flats in our 40-plus band currently sit.

The practical version: for a flat you will live in for a decade or two, the price gap is a present-day certainty and the resale risk is a future uncertainty. Weigh them as such. For a flat bought principally to resell, the shorter the lease, the more you are relying on a forecast nobody can make.

The claim we tested — that demand for older flats remains high, that older flats now account for the largest proportion of total sales, and that buyers are prioritising affordability and space as fewer large flats are built — comes from The Straits Times, linked below, as do the two example transactions: the 104 sqm four-room in Yishun Street 22 at $265,000 in July 2026, and the 64 sqm three-room in Toa Payoh at $288,000. Those are the reporter's facts, attributed rather than claimed as ours.

Everything else is ours. We took our record of HDB resale caveats, computed each flat's age as the transaction year minus its lease commencement year, and produced the share of resale volume by age band for each of the last four years, plus median price, price per square foot and size by age band — overall and within three-, four- and five-room flats — across the 42,905 resales lodged from January 2025 to September 2026. To see how price moves with age, we compared the same flat type within the same town, using only towns with at least 30 resales of it in both bands and weighting each town by its smaller sample, then repeated the comparison within the same storey range as a check.

The caveats are set out in full in the reality-check section above. The most load-bearing: national age bands mix flat types, towns and storeys, so their differences — per square foot included — are partly mix; the same-town comparisons set different flats side by side rather than tracking one flat over time; volume share cannot distinguish shifting demand from an ageing stock; and the current year is partial and under-lodged.

The news:

• The Straits Times — Demand for older HDB flats remains high, 6 August 2026.

The data:

• PropKaki — HDB resale caveats, bucketed by flat age (transaction year minus lease commencement year): share of resale volume by age band 2023 to 2026 year-to-date, median price, price per square foot and size by age band, overall and within three-, four- and five-room flats, across 42,905 resales lodged since January 2025; and median price per square foot at two flat ages within the same flat type and town (towns with at least 30 resales in both bands), as at September 2026.

This is commentary by the PropKaki Editorial Desk on reporting by The Straits Times. The claim, the framing being tested and the two example transactions belong to that newsroom; the testing, the analysis and the opinions are ours.

We want to be fair about the disagreement. The report's central claim — that older flats are now the largest share of resales — is correct, and our own data confirms it independently. Our objection is narrower: the accompanying explanation about space does not hold at the median, and we think that matters, because a buyer who chooses an older flat expecting a larger one is likely to be disappointed by the typical listing.

This is opinion and general information, not financial, legal, tax or property advice. Remaining lease has significant consequences for financing, CPF usage and eventual value, and anyone buying an older flat should take that seriously and seek professional advice.

Published 12 August 2026. Updated 15 September 2026: an earlier version read the national per-square-foot medians as showing that the discount for flat age stops at about twenty years. Within the same town and flat type it does not, so the per-square-foot analysis and the buying advice have been corrected, and all figures refreshed to September 2026 data.