The Land Alone Cost More Than a Finished Bedok Condo

If you grew up in Bedok you may have sat exams on this land. The 30,769 square metre parcel bounded by New Upper Changi Road and Bedok South Road held Temasek Primary School and Temasek Secondary School, as The Straits Times reported. The schools are gone. The buildings are not — whoever builds here has to demolish them first, and engage an asbestos surveyor to run checks and sampling before that can happen.

It is big by the standards of what the state releases in the suburbs: a maximum gross floor area of 86,154 square metres, room for roughly 1,010 homes, and one of the largest residential government land sales sites launched outside the city in recent years.

The location is the kind developers write press statements about — opposite Bedok Town Centre, under a five-minute walk from Bedok MRT and Bedok Mall. UOL and CapitaLand Development duly said the site had "exceptional locational attributes within a mature residential neighbourhood" and would appeal to "HDB upgraders and residents from the surrounding landed housing estates".

That last phrase is doing a lot of work, and we will come back to it.

Four bids came in, and the spread between them is the interesting part.

As reported by The Straits Times. CDL and Hong Realty's bid was second; the report gives the gap rather than the figure.

The winning bid was 13.8 per cent above the second-placed CDL and Hong Realty offer. That is a wide margin in a four-way tender, and it means the consortium was not simply meeting the market — it was reaching past it. Analysts polled by The Business Times earlier that week had put the likely top bid between $1,250 and $1,400 psf ppr. The actual top bid cleared the top of that range.

For context on scale: the report notes this is the first pure-residential government land sales site to fetch more than $1 billion since a Dunearn Road plot sold in June 2022, where the 1,008-unit Grand Dunearn now stands. And it is 15.6 per cent above the $1,330 psf ppr that Allgreen Properties paid for the nearby Bedok Rise site in November 2025 — ten months earlier, same planning area.

Huttons Asia chief executive Mark Yip called it a benchmark price for a pure residential parcel in the suburbs. On the reported figures, that looks right.

UOL and CapitaLand Development have been buying together, and buying a lot. The Straits Times lists the recent run: a Hougang site for $1.5 billion, or $1,179 psf ppr, in December 2025; the $810 million collective purchase of Thomson View Condo; and Parktown Residence in Tampines, a 1,193-unit project that sold almost 90 per cent of its units at its February 2025 launch.

The consortium framed this bid as "a timely replenishment of the consortium's residential pipeline", coming ahead of the mid-October launch of the 1,268-unit Thomson Reserve.

Read that as inventory management, because that is what it is. A developer with a proven suburban mega-project formula and a launch about to clear its books needs the next site before the current one sells out. Parktown Residence is the template: very large, mature eastern town, sold fast, mostly to the surrounding population.

They also told the paper the project would run two- to four-bedroom formats, "keeping total price quantum realistic". That sentence is the tell. When a developer talks about quantum rather than price per square foot, they are signalling smaller units — because the way to keep a total price palatable on expensive land is to sell less floor area, not cheaper floor area.

Here is where our own numbers earn their place, because the district figure you would normally reach for is misleading.

The site is in District 16 — Bedok / Upper East Coast. Across the last 12 months, District 16 recorded 2,134 priced private sales in URA's caveat records, at a blended median of $2,537 per square foot. Put that next to a $1,537 land bid and the deal looks comfortable.

But split that blend by what was actually being sold:

A new home in Bedok's district sold at a median $2,615 per square foot. A standing resale home — an existing condo, already built, someone living in it — sold at a median $1,525. That is a gap of 71 per cent between new and old in the same postal district.

And the land, with nothing on it, cost $1,537 psf ppr.

We need to be careful with that juxtaposition, and we will be: psf ppr is measured per square foot of permitted gross floor area, while a resale PSF is per square foot of strata area — the space a buyer actually owns. GFA includes common areas, so a given amount of GFA yields less saleable strata area, and the two measures are not arithmetically interchangeable. The comparison is indicative, not a calculation.

It is still a remarkable place to have arrived at. Bare land in Bedok now costs roughly what a finished, occupied, older home in Bedok costs. Everything a buyer of the new project pays beyond that — construction, financing, marketing, the developer's margin, the demolition and the asbestos survey — is on top.

On the blended number, District 16 looks like the sixth priciest district in Singapore by median PSF — ahead of District 15 (Katong, Joo Chiat, Amber Road) at $2,337, ahead of District 11 at $2,088, ahead of District 21. For a suburban eastern town, that is a startling ranking.

It is also mostly an artefact, and we would rather say so than let the ranking do work it cannot support.

Look at what supplied the volume:

Two projects — Pinery Residences and Vela Bay — account for 68 per cent of every private sale in the district over the past year. District 16's median is not a description of Bedok. It is very largely a description of two showflats.

This is a general trap worth naming, because it will recur every time a district hosts a big launch: a district league table ranks districts on whatever happened to transact, and a launching project transacts hundreds of units in months while the surrounding resale stock turns over slowly. The district does not become expensive. Its transaction mix becomes expensive.

The honest version of the ranking is narrower and more useful: new-build Bedok is priced like a prime district. Existing Bedok is not.

The upgrader thesis is the load-bearing assumption under a bid this size, so it deserves testing rather than repeating.

The reported case is genuine. The Straits Times notes that nearly 2,300 HDB flats in the area reached their minimum occupation period between 2022 and 2026 — a real, dateable cohort of households now free to sell. ERA chief executive Marcus Chu is quoted saying the median 2025 resale price of five-room and four-room flats under 15 years old was $1.03 million and $860,000, which would indeed leave substantial capital. The paper also reports 52 Bedok flats resold at $1 million or more so far in 2026, against 39 in all of 2025, and a 1,215 sq ft five-room flat at Bedok South Horizon setting a record $1.45 million last week.

Now the town as a whole, from our own HDB resale records. Comparing like-for-like on four-room flats in the latest complete half-year, 2026 H1:

Bedok's median four-room resale flat is $585,000 — nineteenth of the twenty-five towns we can rank, and below the national median of $630,000.

Both things are true, and the distinction matters. Chu's figures are for flats under 15 years old — a young, expensive slice of a town whose stock is mostly much older. The newly-MOP'd blocks are real and their owners are well capitalised; they are simply not the town.

Our million-dollar counts agree. Since January 2025, Bedok has recorded 101 HDB resales at $1 million or above — tenth nationally, against 506 in Toa Payoh. Bedok is on the list, not near the top of it.

So the upgrader pool is a cohort, not a town: roughly 2,300 recently-MOP'd households with strong equity, inside a town whose typical flat sells below the national median — and three other new projects in the same planning area are chasing the same households.

The absorption question is the one the tender result does not answer.

The Straits Times counts four government land sales sites sold in the Bedok planning area since 2025: the Bayshore Road site that became the 515-unit Vela Bay, which drew eight bids in March 2025 with a top offer of $1,388 psf ppr from SingHaiyi; a Bayshore Drive mixed-use site that went to a Frasers Property joint venture at $1,323 psf ppr in July; Bedok Rise to Allgreen at $1,330 psf ppr in November 2025; and now New Upper Changi at $1,537.

Together, the paper reports, those four sites will inject 3,185 new private homes between 2025 and 2028 — and market watchers quoted in the report said the market may take some time to absorb them.

Our records show what that looks like in flight: Vela Bay did 534 sales in the past year at a median $2,860 psf, Pinery Residences 914 at $2,548. The absorption is real and fast. But those launches came first, into the cohort with the most equity. New Upper Changi arrives last, at the highest land cost of the four, into a neighbourhood that will by then have had years of new supply.

Note also the trajectory of the land prices themselves: $1,388, then $1,330, then $1,323, then $1,537. The first three sit in a band. The fourth steps out of it.

Several limits are owed here, and they cut in more than one direction.

We are not forecasting a launch price, and nobody should read one into this. A land bid is one input into what a developer eventually charges. Construction costs, financing, the demolition and asbestos work specific to this site, unit mix, market conditions in 2027 or 2028, and the developer's own margin decisions all sit between $1,537 psf ppr and a price list. We have no data on any of those and we are not going to guess. What our figures establish is the starting point, not the destination.

The psf ppr and PSF measures are different. psf ppr is per square foot of permitted gross floor area; resale PSF is per square foot of strata area, and GFA includes common space. Treat "the land cost more than a resale home per square foot" as a striking indicator, not an equation.

New and resale are not like-for-like either. The 71 per cent gap measures a real premium, but also a difference in the goods: brand-new units in a launching project against standing stock of every age, lease and condition.

Our district figures are dominated by two projects — 68 per cent of the volume. The $1,525 resale median rests on 657 transactions across the district's older stock: a sounder base, still a trailing snapshot that under-lodges at the recent end.

And the HDB comparison is a different market. Four-room resale medians tell you nothing about what a private launch will cost. They are context for the upgrader thesis, not a substitute for anyone's own numbers.

What we would not hedge on: the price of land in suburban Singapore has reached a level where the land alone is comparable to the price of a whole finished older home in the same district. That is not a forecast. That is already in the record.

No launch date and no prices have been announced, and on the reported timeline there is a long way to go. The winning consortium still has to demolish the former Temasek Primary and Temasek Secondary school buildings, and engage an asbestos surveyor to conduct checks and sampling, before construction can begin.

The Straits Times reports the four Bedok-area sites sold since 2025 will inject their 3,185 homes between 2025 and 2028, which places this project — the last of the four to be awarded — at the far end of that window or beyond.

On price, the only public signal is the developers' own statement that the project will run two- to four-bedroom formats, "keeping total price quantum realistic". That is a statement about total ticket size, not about price per square foot, and the two can move in opposite directions. We have no basis for a price estimate and are not offering one.

Not directly, and it is worth being clear about why.

A land bid is a developer's view of what homes will be worth in that spot several years from now. It is not a valuation of your flat, and HDB resale prices and private new-launch prices are set in different markets by different buyers under different rules.

What the reported facts do describe is a cohort effect. Nearly 2,300 flats in the area reached MOP between 2022 and 2026, and a large new project is being planned to sell into exactly those households. If you are in that cohort, you are being courted — by this project and, per the reporting, by three others in the same planning area competing for the same buyers. More projects chasing the same pool is generally a better position to be a buyer in than a worse one.

And the gap in our own data is the thing to actually hold onto: new-build homes in District 16 traded at a median $2,615 psf over the past year, existing ones at $1,525. Whichever side of that gap you are considering crossing, cross it knowing how wide it is. This is general commentary, not advice on your situation, and your flat's value depends on its block, storey, size and remaining lease rather than on any district median.

Two kinds of numbers, kept apart.

The tender details are not ours. The bid amounts and psf ppr figures, the bidders and their ranking, the 13.8 and 15.6 per cent gaps, the analysts' $1,250 to $1,400 expectation, the site dimensions and GFA, the former school use, the demolition and asbestos requirements, the 1,010-unit yield, the Grand Dunearn and Bedok Rise comparisons, the MOP cohort of nearly 2,300 flats, ERA's under-15-year flat medians, the 52-versus-39 million-dollar Bedok count, the Bedok South Horizon record, the other Bedok-area GLS sites, the 3,185-home total, the UOL and CapitaLand track record, and every quoted statement come from the reporting linked below. They are attributed, not claimed as our findings.

The market figures are ours. The District 16 split is our own median over URA private-sale caveat records for postal district 16 across the trailing 365 days, divided by URA type of sale: 1,467 new sales at $2,615 psf, 657 resales at $1,525, 10 sub-sales at $2,380, blended $2,537 across 2,134 priced transactions. The league-table position runs the same records across all 27 districts clearing a 20-sale floor. The four-room HDB medians by town are ours over HDB resale records for 2026 H1, the latest complete half-year, four-room flats only so towns compare like-for-like. The million-dollar counts are ours, resales at $1,000,000 or above since 1 January 2025.

The caveats that matter most: transacted prices under-lodge at the recent end, so counts are a floor. New-sale and resale PSF are not like-for-like, and psf ppr and strata PSF are different measures. Two projects supply 68 per cent of District 16 volume. Town medians are a dated half-year snapshot on four-room flats only, towns under ten such resales omitted. Million-dollar flats are the tail, not the market — 6.4 per cent of HDB resales in 2025, up from 1.8 per cent in 2023, the current year partial and not to be annualised. HDB prices are gross of levy, commission and legal fees.

The news:

• The Straits Times — UOL, CapitaLand aim high with S$1.4 billion or S$1,537 psf ppr bid for New Upper Changi site, 1 September 2026, reported by The Business Times, including comment from Mark Yip of Huttons Asia and previously reported comment from Marcus Chu of ERA.

The data:

• PropKaki analysis of URA private-sale caveat records for postal district 16, trailing 365 days to 8 September 2026, split by type of sale (2,134 priced transactions).
• PropKaki median transacted private-sale PSF by postal district, trailing 12 months, 27 districts clearing a 20-sale floor.
• PropKaki median four-room HDB resale prices by town, 2026 H1, 25 towns with at least ten four-room resales.
• PropKaki counts of HDB resale transactions at $1,000,000 or above, by town, since 1 January 2025.

This is commentary written by the PropKaki Editorial Desk on reporting by The Straits Times and The Business Times. The tender result, the site details and the views of the analysts quoted belong to those newsrooms; the District 16 analysis, the framing and the opinions are ours.

It is opinion and general information — not financial, legal or property advice, and not a recommendation to buy, sell or bid on anything. The project has no announced launch date, price, unit mix or completion date, and all of those will materially affect what it is worth to a buyer. Land prices are not launch prices, and nothing here should be read as a forecast of either.

Published 8 September 2026.