A quiet acceleration.

The Urban Redevelopment Authority’s flash estimate for the third quarter of 2025 put private residential prices up 1.2 percent quarter on quarter, following 1.0 percent in the second quarter. Price growth for the year to September stands at roughly 3.1 percent. Each figure is unremarkable on its own. The sequence is not: this is a market accelerating gently into the year’s end, three months after a new cooling measure.

It is worth restating the backdrop. In July, the Seller’s Stamp Duty holding period was extended to four years precisely because short-hold activity had picked up. The flash estimate suggests the measure did what it was designed to do, removed the trader, and did not do what such measures are often feared to do, which is frighten the holder.

Beneath the index, the composition tells the better story. The strength of 2025 has been carried disproportionately by the landed segment and by owner-occupier demand in the suburbs, while the prime non-landed market, repriced by the 2023 ABSD changes, has stayed subdued. Singapore is running a two-speed residential market, and both speeds are, in their own terms, rational.

A price index that rises one percent a quarter while interest rates fall is not a market under stress. But neither is it a market offering obvious bargains. What it offers instead is legibility: policy that behaves predictably, demand that is domestic and real, and supply that arrives on a published schedule. For international capital accustomed to markets that lurch, legibility is the product.

Our own observation from the ground this quarter: enquiry quality has improved. Fewer speculative approaches; more principals with defined mandates, defined horizons, and financing already arranged. The composition of enquiry usually leads the composition of transactions by about two quarters.

The year will end with the index higher, the volume moderate, and the commentary muted. Some of the best vintages begin in years like this one.

Zaiwealth represents buyers and sellers across Singapore’s private residential market, with an emphasis on prime and landed segments.