D15 Landed Property, Trends, Prices, Supply & Market Forecast

District 15 Landed Property Price Trends

Hi, good evening everybody. Good to host everyone at Supernova.

Maybe let's give a round of applause to the Supernova team as well for hosting us. Yeah, just to thank them for the hospitality.

Yeah, so this is our second stop. So our last round was at District 10 at Daily Ground.

We'll be going to District 19 Serangoon Gardens in November as well. So we're going like, it's a little bit like a round tour in Singapore for all the landed districts.

So today we're going to talk about District 15. And at the end of, of course, my sharing before we invite Joseph, one of our architects friend as well as Jake, one of our builder friends to come up, there's going to be a District 15 landed research report that will be available for download.

So this will be the report that our research team has prepped. Feel free to scan.

It's for our guests tonight. And let's talk about D15.

So D15, I believe a lot of you guys are living in this district or maybe nearby. If not, you might be keen in understanding some of the concepts as well as the trends for landed property in this zone.

And of course, D15 is a very unique place. We call this place as one of the largest quantity of landed properties as well, apart from D10 and D19.

And of course, it's a long belt along the coastline. And I would like to just break it down into a few key zones so that later, as we talk about some concepts, everybody will be on the same page together.

So of course, we will start off with the Sigla Opera and St. Franco era. But it's close then after when we move towards the central portion, you will go past Turcural, Jucheh, Khartong and of course then we'll come to the Goodman as well as Mayer era.

And maybe let me kick start with some of the price trends based on the latest research

in September. So the volume naturally ever since we saw the interest rates increase starting from year 2022 we had close to 11 rounds of rate hikes.

And of course just a couple of days back, 17 September, we had the first round of rate cut, which is 50 basis point from US Fed. And over the last COVID boom, I call it like a very sharp bull run from 2020 until 2022.

That was when we see like what the highest sort of like take-cut break of sales in terms of landed properties and not just for landed, it's also for all private properties and even HDB apartments. These two years, landed volume as well as private apartment volume of transactions has all took a dive.

But the interesting phenomenon in Singapore is that the price growth has still maintained. And of course that could be due to a lot of different reasons as we always chat over our podcast as well as our YouTube channel is that we already have so many rounds of cooling

measures. Most people now buy to stay.

The holding power is strong. Plus, there's now a lot of accumulation of profit from price growth.

So there's no urgency for a lot of landed owners and even private property owners to sell. Now this has been a price growth if you look at the bottom with me that's 35% ever since Q1 2020 until today.

So this is basically for freehold and for the context of all our Landed Clinics will be only talking about freehold and triple nine years landed property. And just by looking at inter, semi and detached alone without taking into consideration any forms of other kinds of landed like cluster house and all that.

The growth has been about 35% plus minus 37% growth basically for D15 alone so it's quite in sync with the overall landed market. And if I were to break down what happened after the rate hikes basically so this was from 2022 until now.

The growth rate is approximately about 5% for whole Singapore.

So you can see that the price growth has stagnated a little bit. It has stabilized, but it's still growing at a very minute range.

And this is for D15, also about 5% growth. So all in, if you notice, COVID, if I minus off the 5%, the COVID season actually brought about close to about 32% growth just within two years.

Alright, now I think the important objective for tonight is that perhaps you're thinking about whether should you do a switch in your portfolio, maybe you're holding on to a private property, you want to switch to a landed market, maybe you're holding on to a smaller landed, you want to switch to a bigger landed.

I think perhaps you are here tonight to understand what is happening in terms of price trends and I'm going to focus a lot about pricing. I'm also going to focus about what do we see next year so that it will help everybody to make a decision.

Now, we always like to talk about this chart.

Why Landed Is the Hardest Asset

The reason is because our notion in terms of understanding the landed market in Singapore is that we believe that this is the hardest form of asset class. What do I mean by hardest form of asset class?

It's the sense that when we see an asset category in terms of residential property having a very fixed supply level, this gives us an indicator that this asset class is of a different level.

That means it's on a level whereby if there's increasing demand but the supply does not increase to catch up with the demand, that will mean that the price will grow and it will accelerate much faster than other forms of residential properties.

And of course we always term landed as Q1 property, meaning that it's meant for high growth but very low rental yield because the quantum is big. So this is the accumulated chart with all the dotted lines of cooling measures.

We have already sort of matured as a country. We are very used to, of course, all the rounds of cooling measures,

LTV, ABSD as well as TDSR. And we are now, I think, in a season whereby most of the buyers are really hunting for own stay.

There are of course investors in the landed market that buy land to subdivide, to rebuild and sell. But by and large, this gives us an indication that even though we have so many rounds of cooling measures, we are still very stable in terms of price trend.

So there again, the hardness of a set moves towards the right-hand side, meaning that when we look at landed properties, it has stagnated at 73,000 ever since 2018. There's no more new plots by government.

Most of the land, even the increase on a year-by-year basis, is because developers buy big land and subdivide, all right? Condos and apartments, they increase by about 10,000 units per year.

So year on year GLS, they increase by 10,000 per annum. To sum it up, basically, we are of the notion and methodology that landed remains as the hardest form of residential asset,

meaning that when you put your capital inside, it's in the sense that because of the fact that there's no more new supply, and it doesn't come in fast.

So for example, if you compare to countries whereby you buy a landed, but three years later when you want to sell, you find that you can only sell back at the same price or lower because the developer next door just launched a brand new landed at the same price that you bought three years ago.

So it is because they have a lot of land. But when supply is fixed, basically we call it a very inelastic kind of asset class.

So a quick introduction for those of you if you are meeting for the first time: myself and my business partner, [redacted], we have been in the market. This is our 17th year.

So in 2018, we started PLB Media. 2022, we started PLB Realty.

And this is our landed consultant team. Some of our teammates are here with us today.

So one of the sort of like an idea we had for the landed clients is that after you hear the segment from myself, our architect friend, our builder friend, is that you can feel free to just approach any of our landed consultants, ask them anything about the landed market, just to chit-chat, make some new friends as well.

We have three channels: the PLB main channel, as well as a new launch review channel. Our realtors, they're all full-time.

We don't take in part-timers. And we only take in full-timers who are really priming themselves to be consultant level.

Everything you see on screen are all done in-house because we believe basically to increase our quality over time. So we just completed landed convention in Shangri-La this year.

We had close to about 500 participants. And of course, we just did our new launch convention on the 7th of July.

At Suntec, we have close to about 900 participants as well.

And let's set some frameworks so that later we can discuss some of the statistics. Okay, so we have a lot of frameworks, but let me sum it up for you.

For landed property, we basically use four frameworks for us to make decisions.

The first one is that we always follow this step-by-step process, whereby we look at district, enclave, then we look at the DNA of the landed, in order to determine what price does it make sense for us to enter, what is the price for us to walk away, all right.

And we have this DNA framework on what we call landed horses. We use a horse concept so that it's easier for us to understand.

There are some houses that are generically very good DNA, all right. That means just the house itself, the plot, the direction of the house, the location, just in terms of what is around the landed by itself is good DNA.

There are some houses with poorer DNA, for example road facing, substation, cross junction facing and

Landed House DNA and Supply Data

Or maybe, for example, let's say if the house you happen to be in the position whereby everybody's sewage pipe flows into your portion, you have a lot of manholes and stuff like that, so there's different types of houses.

Now when a good DNA house gets rebuilt or improved, we call it basically a stellar horse. Now if a poor DNA house gets rebuilt and improved, we call it an enhanced horse.

This is basically for us to go to the next step because when we are hunting for a landed, we want to see, are we looking at a landed that's meant for rebuild, we call it category one. Are we looking for a landed that's meant for A and A, we call it category two.

Are we looking for something just to renovate? We call it category three.

Category 4 are brand new from developers. Okay, once we combine that, we pump in the pricing.

So for example, if I'm hunting for something along to chat, I want to look at all the listings for sale. And if I'm hunting for something to rebuild, I want to look at the price categories of my cat for home over that.

Why? Because if I enter into a cat one home at too high a quantum, after I rebuild, I spent 1.5 to 1.8.

If after two years, I realize that my total costing is actually more than what the market can absorb in my enclave, I'll be in trouble. So I want to make sure that the catfall homes there has a certain level of price benchmark before I decide whether should I enter or what price to walk away.

So once we combine that, we pump in the pricing of all the listings for sale, then we compare and make a decision. So just to give an example, like for example, recently, George did a consult for one of his clients.

This is the level of detail that we go through. He will look at the houses.

Basically, he will look at the total investment needed, LAMPS, BRPSF, and he will mark the category. That means is this cat 1, cat 2, and what is the DNA of the home as well.

So after we compare that in detail, then we make a decision on what price to enter. So this is just an example on the level of home mode that usually our consultants do for our clients when they were hunting for a lender on the ground.

And of course, in the upcoming property summit that we'll be holding end of October next month, there will be a segment which is a landed masterclass. This will be a two-day event later on, Shamor details.

But some of the things we'll be talking about is that if you're interested in buying land to do subdivide, we're going to have some of our architects and builder partners. We'll talk about some of the things that can do, some of the things that cannot do.

Example, are you able to detach and subdivide certain units? What is the wrong and right way and things like that?

Some technical stuff if you are very interested.

All right, now let's look at some of the inventory trends. Now this is basically the overall trend line for PSF level in D15.

So the green one at the top are naturally the terrace houses. Terrace houses because of the lower quantum smaller size, the PSF is naturally higher.

All right so overall trend line is the black color one but let's dive into details. So it is also good to note that when we look at D15, terrace houses we have about 5,300 units.

Semi D you have about 2,531 units detached at about 1,006 or you have about 9,400 landed homes in D15. The largest district actually belongs to D19 if you notice D19 is about 11,000 is a very huge enclave and of course when you look at D10 is also rather huge at about 6,008.

Now one thing to note is that when we look at the overall landed supply there again we have about 73,356 in the whole Singapore at the bottom corner left right hand side. And the important thing to note is that sometimes when you look at landed homes they behave in different enclave.

For example if you buy into a landed enclave with very little of your type the transaction volume might be an issue.

Because if you buy into a certain zone let's say you're going for a semi-D but the whole district only got this number of semi-D sometimes because of a lack of transaction, you cannot see the price growth over the years.

Sometimes being in an enclave of a larger quantity and density, it might be a good thing. All right.

So let's look at D15 number of listings. Basically we just call everything from property guru for our research team.

But I need to disclaim that when it comes to lender properties, sometimes developers, when they market their properties, they open up the listings to a lot of realtors. There could be a lot of duplicated listings as well.

So we usually like to take probably like a 25% to 30% cut of the overall quantity.

D15 Listings, Absorption Ratios and Post-COVID Momentum

Okay. So these are the amount of listings being advertised in D15 as of today — terrace, detached, inter-terrace, semi-D now.

All these slides will be in the D15 report that you can download later. Okay.

So it's important to note that when we look at basically the number of listings, we want to see what are basically the price growth movement. So basically, let's say for example, we look at inter-terrace, freehold D15.

If I want to hunt for something in the four to five million dollars range, basically, these are largely the cat one homes. That means they are meant for rebuild.

There's about 80 advertisements right now. We track them on a month to month basis to see whether is this depleting.

Because if it's depleting, it means that the market is moving to the next price bandwidth. So we want to track that.

Because we want to see, should we enter now? Is the inventory dropping?

Is it being absorbed at a faster rate on a month to month basis?

So basically, terrace houses in D15, they have the fastest turnover. Absorption rate ratio in our context is that when a listing, when a group of listings is in the district, how fast will it be absorbed from the market?

That means how fast are our buyers absorbing it? And we want to see whether should we go for, for example, let's say we have an intermediary budget and we are considering between inter-terrace, new build, maybe versus an older semi-D.

Sometimes the price can cross sandwich each other. Later I will show you.

So absorption ratio basically help us to make a decision to see, okay, should I go for something in this district that are very easily absorbable. Because maybe three, five years later when I want to sell, when I hit a roadblock that I cannot sell in a specific period of time.

Because I don't want to buy something that maybe the existing demand is not high and I'll be faced with like 12 to 18 months not being able to exit the market.

Alright, so corner terraces. Corner terraces are usually in between semi and inter, in terms of decision making because a lot of buyers when they look at corner terraces, they will hit the dilemma, should I go for semi-D or corner terrace because semi-D is of a higher status in a sense in the eyes of buyers.

So semi-D basically just take note for eight to 10 mil. There's a lot of duplicated listings basically for developers listing, but it also reflects the current asking price of category four homes, which are brand new semi-Ds in D15.

They are all now asking at about eight to 10 million. So if you look at category one, they are now in the range of about five to seven million.

So this might mean that if let's say you have a good builder, good architect, you want to rebuild, this might be a good season. Why?

Because the gap is pretty far. Alright, so once you rebuild, you're plonking, let's say two million

dollars, you might still be able to have savings compared to buying off the market immediately. So these are just some absorption ratio basically for semi-D houses and of course for detached cat 4 homes brand new are in the range of 15 mil to 20 odd mil upwards.

Very little in the range of 8 to 10 million, very little listings available. Now let's have a look at the change.

Basically the change on a month to month basis just allow us as I mentioned to see if certain units are being absorbed quickly. All right, so if there's a deep in inventory, it could mean that in that range, this type of homes are being absorbed at a faster rate.

And I will leave all these details in the report. Our research team has actually elaborated in the D15 report as well.

Let's come to something a little bit more interesting. All right, so let's look at the price disparity.

Now, there's some movement in the market. We

like to look at disparity on a quarter to quarter basis. So basically, what is happening is that if we look at the five different types of products, okay?

Why is it important to note the PSF range of resale, TOP, new launch strata landed as well as pure landed? There's a reason.

The reason is because when we look at the two main types of properties, let me just scroll back a little bit. New condos usually lead the way for PSF growth in the whole market.

It changed the behavior of buyers on the ground. The Apex property, basically I'm talking about pure landed 399 freehold, it follows suit on a secondary kind of momentum.

Let me just share with you why. So when we look at this, basically this was what happened in 2020 after COVID.

So basically after COVID, we were looking at new launches from developers at about 2008 PSF, resale was about thousand two plus. TOP means condos that the buyers just took their keys.

Okay, that was at about thousand five.

Price Ranges and Entry-Level Landed Demand

Strata landed about a thousand and pure landed, take note for pure landed, we always look at the land PSF. So land PSF was at about one thousand three hundred and ninety-six.

What happened one year later was that everybody started buying, there was a lot of form interest — interest rates was at about one percent, the market was very heated up, new condos start to bump up to about 2,000 and usually what happens when new condos move up is that the rest will start to catch up already.

Okay, so new launches always lead the movement and then the rest will start to catch up. So in fact, landed also started to catch up as well.

Now what happened this year is that now we are at this range at this level but what is happening on the ground is that this is catching up very fast. So resale condo now is catching up very quickly, the sellers are asking for higher and higher prices on the ground.

Okay, why? Because when they look at the PSF of new condos, there's nothing much to buy and they have to sacrifice the size to buy smaller.

They are actually asking at a higher price.

Landed pricing our forecast for next year, what is going to happen is that it is going to catch up to match up a lot. Why?

Let me share with you the key rationale in the next set of slides but in summary, we think that 2025, it could be the year that landed price will move up much faster than the rest. So I will elaborate in the next few slides.

One of the reasons is because if you look at a quantum basis, there's nothing much to buy already. So we are looking at smaller, smaller kind of units, 1,000 square feet.

I have to spend about $3,000,000, $3,000,000, $5,000,000, $4,000,000 dollars and if I look at the inter-terrace over here basically for inter-terrace just remove this chair for a little while yeah. For inter-terrace right now as of September these are meant for rebuild A&A renovation as well as new build these are the price ranges D15 okay.

Now of course take note D15 is huge something in opera estate is a different price from other parts, because there's different price behavior across the entire D15. Now if you look at, okay so this is the summary of the price ranges.

Now if you look at basically semi D, the behavior of cat1, cat2, cat3, cat4, it rests in this price ranges. Now sometimes it will be interesting to note that if you have a higher budget, you can actually let's say for example you can actually go for like a six and a half million dollars brand new into Terras.

You might want to explore the other category because you could actually get a semi D. But it's not a cat for semi D it could be something that you need to do renovation or something that you need to do E&A.

But when you have a certain quantum you should explore all types of landed just to make sure you don't shortchange yourself all right now when I

plonking of course the detach then you will fall within that range over there. So later if you want to have a look at this barber slide you can get from our consultant they'll be happy to share more with you.

Now this is basically the dilemma of a buyer in 2023. So in 2023 when we look at basically like category one inter-terrace you can still get something at about three and a half million.

So you can get something at three and a half, even let's say four million you're getting like a cat two home already four and a half maybe it's nicely renovated that was in 2023 and then our first MED is four and a half to five and a half million.

The reason is because the base layer is of a lower quantum range. Then when we move up to 2024, the base layer started to improve in price.

When that happens, it gives pressure to the highest apex product. So when this thing moves up, basically it

push up the inter-terraces and semi D. So it always behaves like that, which is why when we say that new launches, when they lead the pricing, they also pull up resale condos, they pull up to be condos strata landed will also want to catch up.

But most importantly is that they create pressure for the top Apex product. All right?

Now, what might happen in 2025 is that we think that it's time for the landed pricing to escape. Because what the want to escape is that it makes sense for them to escape because they are the Apex property.

And people will find that it makes more and more sense to get a landed. And when that pressure comes in terms of demand, they will start absorbing the entry level landed and then it will start to create a new momentum.

That means once existing landed owners realize that, they will start to ask for higher and higher pricing. So we think that 2025 might be a year of movement for landed pricing because

2025 Outlook, Rate Cuts and House Subdivision

The base entry is expected to rise, plus we're having a very low interest rate environment moving on. So let's have a look at some macro events.

We just had this 17 September, 50 basis point cut. If you look at all the news, they are all expecting 25 basis point cut, but if they give a one shot 50 basis point cut, it means that there are some data that are not released to us.

That means perhaps US job market is really bad. They just want to prevent a recession.

They have to cut it at 50 basis point. There's some projection.

Of course, we are not 100% sure whether it will happen, but the next Fed meeting is expected to be in November. All right.

Now, this is the global wealth and where people park their wealth. And something to note is that there are some key events that will happen as well.

Of course, these are all macro basis and whether it happens or not, it really depends on the month by month basis. But by and large, people see real estate as a safe haven because of low volatility, especially in Singapore, whereby everybody that buys a real estate, they have to hold it for three years.

So everybody comes in with the mindset that I will hold for three years and I can sustain for three years before I buy. So the holding power mindset is there and because of this it creates more stability as well.

There might be a key event that will happen of course after election. By and large, this is a report from BlackRock, basically most of the time after election you see an increase in S&P 500.

What that might create is that once we come next year when people start to take profit, they might then come back to real estate as well. So this might be something that you want to take note of.

Now let's have a look at some of the listings that are available. These are some listings that PLB consultants are currently marketing.

Just want to share a few some listings that we have. This in D14, Janet Ismail is a detached that you can actually subdivide, alright.

There's also D15 listings. This is Siglap Plain Franco?

This is the East Coast Road, very unique one which is just beside Katong I1-2 more. And then you have this one is at East Coast Road, it's a corner detached huge plot of land 7,000 square feet as well.

And then this is at Woolloo Sea Club, semi-D. So for D16, B-Line Lane, and then you have Interterra, Stripper Nias, very huge land plot 4,625.

Now, all these details in-depth, our consultants later, they can share with you as well. Bedok Real, Semi-D, Giant Tanjong, this is a new build with a massive build up, 6,629 square feet, asking at 6.5 million.

And then, of course, when you look at some of the developer listings that are available, these are also some developer listings that we have access to as well. So this is at Palm Road, we have Tamling, Ida Street, they're all in D15 Fidelio.

Now I just want to share some quick case studies with you. In case let's say you're in the season that you're thinking about switching or maybe you want to sell your landed, you're exploring some ideas.

Now because of all the events and of course like our years that we have been in the landed market we have established I would say quite a trusted network with developers who are always buying land and of course our buyers who are always hunting for land as well.

This is an example that George and Jim, they have just successfully sold it early part of this year.

So one of the key things that PLB always do is that when it comes to selling a landed home, is that we want to find the positioning for the landed property and we want to help the potential buyer to visualize the potential because buying a property is both emotional and analytical.

So there's two sets of beliefs as well. Firstly, the person must feel good like the house.

Secondly, is that they must know what they can do with it. So basically, this plot, eventually, it was not sold to an user family.

It was sold to a developer because basically, we talk about the potential of subdividing it further into interterrace and corner terrace. Now, we also believe that all landed properties can find its buyer, even though maybe it has lower DNA, but if it's positioned correctly, it could still be soaked.

So for example, this home, one of my favorite example, 11 agents has tried to sell it, they couldn't sell because of the long driveway. Now in the olden days, developers like to buy a huge detach, cut it into two or three, but last time they like to cut houses in a long driveway fashion.

Now there's still two, but there are newer technologies. But this is an example that the house is cut into three.

So there's one at the front, one in the middle, one at the back. So we will toss to sell the one in the middle.

Positioning Landed Homes and Upcoming Events

Of course, a lot of buyers, according to our owners' privacy, is that when they come to look at a property, they find that the long driveway is eating up the land. And some of the buyers don't even want to come in because they say the agent never tell them it's a long driveway house.

But most of the time is because of positioning. And if the positioning is just about putting a photo for a landed property, it doesn't really show the essence and the USP of the house because landed property is like one of the top tier products.

You cannot just sell it by plain vanilla marketing. So it has to have a lot of positioning.

So what we did was that our team basically within the idea of how can the potential by utilize the long driveway creatively and in a very transparent fashion, like for example, if they have multiple cars or they can actually utilize half of it as like a garden or maybe like an entertainment kind of like open space to host people and stuff like that.

It's really to create ideas for the buyer and eventually it still took us a period of time to sell and only seven buyers came but nobody talked about the long driveway because they are already aware it has a long driveway.

All right so this is our bespoke landed investment journey framework. We have a five-step process to help our clients basically from A all the way to E and most importantly is that if you need any advice you can come for a free consult with our landed consultants only for our guests for our landed clinic.

Y'all can feel free to scan this will lead you to a landing page to key in your name email and contact. Now a little bit of advertisement so it's 2025 for real estate a seller's market or buyer's market.

So what are some of the zipli help secrets by multiple property investors when it comes to real estate financing? Now 70% of landed property buyers commit these nine mistakes when it comes to selecting and investing in their first landed.

If you want to avoid these nine mistakes, learn these strategies that will share more in PropTiSummit. And we're very excited for this event because we have a lot of feedback from the ground that a lot of consumers, they want a lot of in-depth kind of learning.

So we are creating like a masterclass. There's going to be like two full days of different topics all the way from landed property investment, landed technical kind of like details like A&A and stuff like that, upgrading from HDB to condo, new launch investment as well as property financing and stuff like that.

There's also going to be five playbooks that will be given to all participants and they are of different topics from portfolio to financing to landed and condo.

So for the landed masterclass we'll be talking about some technical stuff as well for example subdivision, what to look out for, things to avoid, mistakes to avoid, things to have so that when you want to sell it's easier and of course like when it comes to A&A reconstruction and redevelopment we're getting our experts to talk about your architects friends as well as builder as well.

So there's also a new concept that recently I transpond from one of our clients is that this client creatively actually redeveloped his landed into a dual key fashion.

I believe it's a new concept and I believe this might be a concept that might come up more rapidly in future as the landed quantum price starts to go up, money mortgage is increasing. So basically this concept is that the entire level is created into like a two-bedder for rental income.

The living dining room is on the second level and then the third and fourth level still is able to allow them to have four bedrooms. A very new idea that we will talk about during property submit as well.

So this is on 26, 27 October. It's a 199.

After that, you'll be the normal 399. Because we are booking on the whole venue, a lot of the ticket cost is to cover the costing.

And of course, for the playbooks, for the content, as well as basically the meals are provided as well. Now, end of day one, there'll be a networking with the rest of the participants, as well as our consultants in the evening also.

So it's going to be held at Hornay, Singapore at Clark Key, very centralized, good parking space. We are booking all the entire space over here with different breakout rooms.

All in basically, if you want to join a VIP Club,

VIP Club and Report QR Codes

And let me just pass over back to our MC and then we invite our speakers up.

Alright, thank you. Thank you very much.