The cost of money, halved.

At the end of 2024, three-month compounded SORA stood a little above three percent, and fixed-rate mortgages were being written near 3.2 percent. Fifteen months later, SORA has traded near one percent, daily prints have touched 0.88 percent, and banks are offering fixed packages from roughly 1.4 percent. Local forecasters expect the benchmark to trough around one percent in mid-2026 before drifting modestly higher.

In most property markets, a halving of the cost of money inside eighteen months produces visible froth. Singapore’s response has been a 3.4 percent annual price rise and moderate volume. The absence of euphoria is not the absence of effect; it is evidence of how completely the policy framework now channels where cheap money can flow.

Speculative channels are closed. The four-year Seller’s Stamp Duty clock removes the levered flipper. The sixty percent foreign ABSD removes the offshore momentum buyer. Total debt servicing rules cap the household bid. What remains open is the channel the framework was designed to leave open: the long holder refinancing, the upgrader transacting, and the balance-sheet buyer of commercial and investment assets, for whom a two-point fall in funding cost transforms the arithmetic of a ten-year hold.

This is precisely the pattern of the past year’s transactions. The large office and hospitality trades of 2025 and early 2026 penciled because financing costs fell to meet unhurried sellers. The landed market strengthened because owner-occupiers with mortgages felt richer and holders felt no pressure. The one segment cheap money has not reflated, prime foreign-buyer condominiums, is the one segment a policy wall stands in front of.

For clients, the actionable point is about sequencing. Money at these levels is a window, not a regime; the same forecasters calling a one percent trough are calling it a trough. Debt-financed acquisitions of long-hold assets underwrite better in 2026 than they have since 2021, and the assets worth financing are, as ever, the ones that will still be scarce when rates are ordinary again.

Zaiwealth advises on acquisition strategy and timing across Singapore residential, commercial and hospitality assets.