What sellers ask, and what buyers actually pay
Every listing you read is an opinion. Every transaction behind it is a fact. The distance between the two is not the same in every market — and knowing which market you are in changes what an asking price is telling you.
Two different kinds of number
An asking price is set by one seller, on one day, with one property to sell. It is visible, current, and unconstrained — nothing stops anyone asking anything. A transacted price is what a buyer and a seller actually agreed. It is constrained by a real negotiation and a real loan, but it is published with a lag, and it describes a property that is no longer for sale.
Buyers usually treat the first as the market and the second as history. That is exactly backwards, and the size of the mistake depends on which market you are standing in.
HDB resale: the gap is about 2%
We measured every HDB resale asking price we could attribute to a specific block against that block's own recent transacted median — not the town's, not the flat type's nationally, the block's. The median asking price sat 2.0% above it.
| Reference the asking price is measured against | Median asking / transacted |
|---|---|
| The block's own recent median | +2.0% |
| The town × flat-type median | +0.2% |
The spread matters more than the middle. A quarter of listings asked below the block's recent record (25th percentile: 0.97×) and a quarter asked more than 7% above it (75th percentile: 1.07×). By flat type the premium ran from +1.4% on 5-room flats to +4.0% on 2-room.
Two percent is remarkably tight, and the reason is structural rather than lucky. HDB publishes every resale price, monthly, block by block. HDB's own valuation is built on transacted evidence. When the record is that visible, an asking price that strays from it is arguing with something everyone in the room can look up.
Industrial: the gap is about 14%
Run the same comparison on industrial — asking price against the last transacted price for comparable space in the same project — and the median premium is 13.7%, nearly seven times the HDB figure.
Nothing about industrial sellers is greedier. The market is simply darker:
- No monthly public price feed. There is no industrial equivalent of the HDB resale table, so there is no shared reference for either side to point at.
- Thin volume. A strata factory unit may see a handful of sales in a year, so the “last transacted price” is often genuinely old — and part of that 13.7% is not optimism, it is elapsed time.
- Units are less alike. Floor loading, ceiling height, ramp or cargo-lift access and permitted use can separate two units in the same building far more than two flats in the same block.
What this does not mean
It does not mean you should offer 2% under on a flat and 14% under on a factory. The gap is a property of the market's information, not a discount anyone is owed. Read it as calibration:
- In HDB resale, an asking price is close to a claim about the record. When one is 10% above its own block's recent sales, that is a specific claim about a specific flat — the storey, the renovation, the remaining lease — and it is fair to ask which.
- In industrial, an asking price is mostly a starting position, and a big part of the distance to the record is the age of the record itself. Check when the comparable actually traded before treating the gap as ambition.
- For private condos we do not quote a figure, because we have not measured one on that book to the same standard. The mechanism is the same — caveats publish with a lag — but a number we have not measured is a number we will not print.
How to use the record instead
The useful question is never “how far above the market is this?” in the abstract. It is: what has this exact size, in this exact building, actually sold for, and how recently? That is the comparison our rating makes, and it is the comparison you can make yourself on any project or block page — the lodged sales are printed there.
Check an asking price against the record. Paste a listing link, or name the project and type the price.
Common questions
Do listings always ask more than the property sells for?
No. In HDB resale about a quarter of listings ask below the block's own recent transacted median. The median listing asks about 2% above it, but the distribution runs both ways.
Why is the industrial gap so much bigger than the HDB gap?
Because industrial has no monthly public price feed, far fewer transactions per building, and units that differ more from each other. Part of the 13.7% median premium is genuinely the age of the last comparable sale rather than seller optimism.
Should I offer 2% below the asking price on an HDB flat?
The figure is not a negotiating rule. It describes how the market as a whole prices listings against the record. What matters for one flat is what that block's recent sales, at that flat type and size, actually show.
Where does the transacted record come from?
HDB resale prices are published monthly by the Housing & Development Board through data.gov.sg. Private-property transactions are lodged as caveats with the Urban Redevelopment Authority and published with a lag.
HDB transaction data: Housing & Development Board, via data.gov.sg, used under the Singapore Open Data Licence. Private transaction data: caveats lodged with the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Asking-price comparisons are measured against transacted evidence for the same block or project; medians and percentiles are stated as measured. A PriceVero rating is not a valuation and is not prepared by a licensed valuer.