The New Launch Premium Just Narrowed To +32.6% — The Smallest Gap In Eight Quarters Of Caveats

The premium on a new launch over a resale unit tends to get talked about as if it were a fixed thing. The caveats say otherwise. Across the last eight quarters it has swung from the high thirties to above sixty per cent, and in the latest quarter it sits lower than at any point in that run.

According to URA Data Service caveats, 2Q2026 recorded 2,002 developer sales at a median of S$2,326 psf, against 4,000 resales at S$1,754 psf. That is a gap of +32.6%. Against 2Q2025, the developer median moved -10.6% and the resale median +4.2%. Developer sales made up 33.4% of the two kinds of caveat combined. Here is what stood out to us when we lined the eight quarters up side by side.

The gap is narrower this quarter than in any of the eight quarters we looked at

The series does not trend so much as zigzag. It opens at +37.4% in 3Q2024, jumps to +55.2% in 4Q2024, eases to +42.3% in 1Q2025, then climbs again to +54.4% in 2Q2025. The widest reading comes in 4Q2025 at +62.9%. From there it steps down to +45.8% in 1Q2026 and +32.6% in the latest quarter.

One thing the chart cannot settle is how much of each swing is composition. The quarter labels sit above very different transaction counts, from 1,089 developer caveats in 3Q2024 to 3,339 in 3Q2025. A median is a median of whatever launched and sold in those three months. A quarter dominated by one segment's launches will read differently from one spread across the island.

The chart below plots the island-wide premium quarter by quarter, with the developer caveat count behind each point.

Over the past year the two medians moved in opposite directions

The narrowing did not come from one side alone. The developer median reads S$2,601 psf in 2Q2025 and S$2,326 psf in 2Q2026, a move of -10.6% y-o-y. The resale median reads S$1,684 psf and S$1,754 psf across the same two quarters, +4.2% y-o-y. So the top line came down while the base line drifted up.

The resale column is the steadier of the two. It runs S$1,597, S$1,633, S$1,674, S$1,684, S$1,723, S$1,736, S$1,734 and S$1,754 psf across the eight quarters. The developer column covers a much wider band, from S$2,194 psf in 3Q2024 to S$2,828 psf in 4Q2025. That difference in volatility is most of the story of the gap.

Resale caveat counts also held up in 2Q2026, at 4,000 against 3,410 in the quarter before. The full quarterly table is below.

Developer sales fell back to a third of the two kinds of caveat

Developer share moves around as much as the premium does. It reads 20.4% in 3Q2024, 44.9% in 4Q2024, 22.8% in 2Q2025, 44.3% in 3Q2025 and 33.4% in 2Q2026. Launch timing drives that column more than anything else, and the caveats record only the outcome, not the schedule behind it.

What is worth noting is how the two columns sit together. The two quarters with the lowest developer share, 3Q2024 and 2Q2025, carry gaps of +37.4% and +54.4%. The widest gap, 4Q2025 at +62.9%, came with a share of 41.8%. In other words, there is no clean link in this table between how much of the market was new and how far above resale the new median sat. The data here cannot tell us which projects made up each quarter's mix, and that is the piece doing the work.

The three segments do not line up in the order you might expect

Split by segment, 2Q2026 puts CCR at the top: a developer median of S$3,335 psf against a resale median of S$2,190 psf, a gap of +52.3%. OCR comes next, with S$2,181 psf against S$1,571 psf, or +38.9%. RCR sits lowest at +31.2%, with S$2,605 psf against S$1,985 psf.

The counts matter here. CCR recorded just 67 developer caveats in the quarter, against 673 resales. That is a thin base for a median, and a handful of large or small units can move it. RCR and OCR are firmer, at 476 and 1,459 developer caveats respectively, with 1,059 and 2,268 resales behind them.

Read together, the island-wide +32.6% is closest to the RCR reading, while both CCR and OCR sit above it. Segment medians are not like-for-like comparisons either, since tenure, project age and unit size all differ across the two pools. The segment table is below.

What this gap measures is narrower than it first looks

Every number here comes from recorded caveats, private homes only, with per-area figures as psf. The gap compares two medians drawn from two different pools of transactions in the same three months. It is not a like-for-like comparison of the same unit new and resold, and it is not a valuation of any home.

That matters when a figure swings by thirty percentage points inside two years. The developer pool is whatever was on sale and selling; the resale pool is the whole stock. Age, tenure, floor, size and location all vary between them, and the caveats do not hold any of those constant. So the honest reading of 2Q2026 is a narrower spread between the two medians, not a measured change in what a buyer pays for newness.

A few things stay open. The eight quarters show the premium moving in both directions, so one narrow reading does not by itself mark a turn. What 3Q2026 caveats will show depends partly on which projects launch and where, and the resale median has moved in a tight band for two years while the developer median has not. The segment split is the part we would watch most closely, since CCR's 67 developer caveats can shift a long way on a small number of deals.

A single headline gap rarely tells you much on its own. It is the eight quarters behind it, the counts under each point and the segment mix inside them that give the figure any shape. Read that way, 2Q2026 is one more observation in a series that has been anything but steady.

Method: URA caveats split by sale type (developer 'new sale' against 'resale'; sub-sales excluded), grouped by the quarter of the sale month; medians are of price per square metre, shown per square foot. The two medians cover different projects, sizes and ages, so the gap is a description of what transacted, not a like-for-like premium. Private figures are from URA Data Service caveats, HDB figures from data.gov.sg resale records, both loaded weekly by this site's ingest. Medians are of the non-excluded transactions in the period named; sales flagged by the hygiene rules (related-party transfers, bulk deals, outliers) are left out. Every figure is indicative and drawn from recorded transactions, not a formal valuation.