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First, we had a , and now a . This is for a maisonette; and the high asking price may be based on how comparatively new it is, for this particular flat type (the completion date for the flat is 1991, and HDB stopped making maisonettes in 1995 – so it’s among the newer maisonettes).  This leads me to wonder if concealing the COV is still helping at all. Back in 2014 – the last time resale flat prices were going out of control – HDB ceased to publicly disclose COV data. From that point on, buyers and sellers would have to agree on the price first, and only after that would they get the valuation. So if you offered a price that’s too high, that’s too bad – COV isn’t covered by the loan, so a lot more would be coming out of your pocket. Zero COV quickly after that move, and resale flat prices saw consecutive years of decline until around the Covid housing crunch.  So why is it no longer helping to rein in resale flat prices? One reason is simply the substantial sale proceeds of right-sizers: anyone who sold their private property at the heights of the last few years can easily afford to for a flat they really like (and they may not mind doing so, if they intend to live there the rest of their lives).  Also, it doesn’t help that private property prices are just out of reach for some people. Even in 2022, when we wrote about the , you just couldn’t get any reasonably priced alternatives if you wanted to stay in the same area. For the same reason this $1.4m price now seems rather “low” in comparison to the new $1.73m record, a million-dollar HDB may seem justifiable to someone with a $2m budget that is priced out of private property in the same area.  But the other reason is simply that, when determining a price, we look at past transactions. We don’t see how much of the transaction is COV, we just see the total amount (e.g., we won’t know that an $800,000 flat had a COV of $100,000, we just see the $800,000). So concealing the data is immaterial: prices keep climbing on the back of transaction records. So while removing COV did work at the time, and was quite the stroke of genius, it was a move that was effective just that one time (and I should add, HDB also introduced the Mortgage Servicing Ratio at around that time, which also helped).  This is due to an incident that has made the number important: HDB had a $2 million listing taken down from its portal, . And to be clear, HDB was right about the listing being misleading: it was actually two flats, not one (see the link).  However, we know how these types of information get messy in public. And the general perception now is: . So if by chance this $1.88 million unit sells…and a subsequent one really reach $2 million, it’s going to make for some terrible optics. This would definitely fuel the flames among disgruntled home buyers, who are convinced that housing is unaffordable. HDB pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat once already, when they decided to remove COV data. It would probably be to no one’s surprise that they’re working on a second rabbit right now, let’s see how things play out for the rest of 2024.  For more on the Singapore property market, follow us on Stacked.