Freehold Is a Third of Singapore's New-Launch Projects and a Tenth of the Homes

Far East Organization opens previews today for The Serra Residences, 133 freehold units on Bassein Road in Novena, with bookings from 16 October. Huttons chief executive Mark Yip framed the scarcity in a line that has been widely quoted: of the roughly 4,000 new private non-landed homes launched in the first half of this year, "only 287, or 7%, are freehold."

That number is right, and it understates how odd the freehold market is. Counted by project rather than by home, freehold is not scarce at all — it is a third of everything being sold. The gap between those two ways of counting is the whole story, and it has a consequence buyers rarely price.

A third of the projects, a tenth of the homes

Across the 101 residential developments currently open for sale or upcoming in Singapore, holding 34,475 units between them:

A buyer scanning project names sees freehold everywhere. A buyer who needs a particular size, in a particular district, at a particular price, finds almost nothing — because the median freehold development is a 53-unit block and the median leasehold one is nine times larger.

The distribution is starker than the medians:

Seventeen of the 35 freehold projects — just under half — hold 50 units or fewer. Together those seventeen developments contain 292 homes, fewer than one median-sized 99-year launch. Twelve of them have 20 units or fewer, including a two-unit development in District 11 and two three-unit sites. Exactly one freehold project in the market exceeds 500 units: The Continuum in District 15, at 816.

On the leasehold side the pattern inverts. Fifty-four of the 62 projects hold more than 200 units; three hold 50 or fewer.

Why it is shaped this way

Freehold land in Singapore is not released; it is recycled. The state sells 99-year leases through the Government Land Sales programme in parcels sized for several hundred homes. Freehold sites come to market only when an existing freehold property is sold — a collective sale, a redevelopment of a single bungalow plot, an old walk-up block. The Serra Residences sits on a 51,396 sq ft site that Far East bought in a 2010 collective sale for $122 million.

That supply mechanism caps the output. A single bungalow plot yields six units, not six hundred. So freehold arrives as a long tail of small redevelopments, while leasehold arrives in blocks.

It also concentrates geographically. District 15 alone — the East Coast stretch from Tanjong Rhu through Katong to Siglap — holds nine of the 35 freehold projects and 1,477 of the 3,653 freehold units, 40% of the national total. Add Districts 9, 10 and 11 and you have 21 of 35 projects. If you want freehold outside the old private-housing belt, there are five projects in the whole Outside Central Region, holding 429 units.

What comes attached to the tenure

Here is the part that matters at the point of purchase. You cannot buy freehold at launch without also buying a small project, because almost no large freehold projects exist. The two decisions arrive bundled, and they have different consequences.

A 40-unit development shares its maintenance bill — lifts, pumps, landscaping, managing agent, sinking fund — across 40 owners instead of 400. It usually has no pool worth the name, no gym, no function room, and no scale to absorb a major repair without a special levy. When you come to sell, there are a handful of comparable transactions in the project's history rather than hundreds, so a single distressed sale can set your valuation, and a bank's valuer has thin evidence to work with.

The units themselves are also bigger and dearer. Weighted by unit count across the projects that publish a full mix, the average freehold unit is 1,209 sq ft against 889 sq ft for leasehold — 36% larger. Among the projects quoting an opening price, the median freehold launch starts at $2,354 psf against $2,123 psf for leasehold, about 11% higher. Both of those gaps compound: more square feet at more dollars per square foot.

So the quantum arithmetic that caught Amberwood at Holland last weekend — 11% sold at $3,019 psf, with no one- or two-bedroom units in the mix — applies with extra force here. The freehold market has very few small, cheap entry formats, because the projects are too small to carry a broad unit mix in the first place. The Serra Residences starts at a two-bedroom-plus-study of 710 sq ft, which for a 133-unit freehold development is unusually accommodating.

Where The Serra Residences sits

At 133 units it is, by the standards of its own category, large. Only fourteen of the 35 freehold projects now marketed hold 100 units or more; Serra would be the fifteenth. It is freehold in District 11, 28 storeys, with completion scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2030, and a mix running from 710 sq ft two-bedroom-plus-study units on levels 4 to 16 up to two penthouses of 2,648 and 2,669 sq ft at the top. Pricing has not been published, so there is no psf to assess yet.

The reason it draws attention is arithmetic, not marketing. In a category where the median project is 53 units and almost everything is clustered in Districts 9, 10, 11 and 15, a 133-unit freehold development with a sub-800 sq ft entry format is one of perhaps a dozen things a freehold buyer can actually choose between this year.

What to do with this

If freehold is on your list, separate the two things you are buying. Decide what you think perpetual tenure is worth, then price the small-project costs separately: the maintenance fee per unit, the sinking-fund balance, the absence of facilities, and the thinness of the resale comparables. Our earlier read on what the long-run data says about freehold versus 99-year covers the tenure half of that question.

If you are comparing a freehold launch against a leasehold one, you are almost never comparing like with like on size. A 36% difference in average unit area and an 11% difference in opening psf means the freehold quantum is structurally higher before tenure is priced at all. Compare total outlay and monthly cost, not psf.

If you need a specific district, check the supply before you set your heart on tenure. Outside Districts 9, 10, 11 and 15 there are fourteen freehold projects in the country, and five of those are in the Outside Central Region.

If you are selling a freehold resale unit in a large project, note what the new-launch market cannot offer: scale and perpetual tenure together. There is one new freehold project above 500 units in Singapore right now.

Method

Project counts, tenure, unit totals, districts, regions and unit mixes are computed from TRIBE's own New Projects Directory dataset, generated 24 September 2026, filtered to residential developments with a status of "open for sale" or "upcoming" and excluding commercial strata — 101 projects and 34,475 units. Tenure is grouped as freehold, 999-year and 99-year, with the dataset's "leasehold" label folded into 99-year. Median project size is the median of total unit counts. Average unit area is weighted by unit count across the 1,098 freehold and 5,248 leasehold units whose project publishes a full unit mix with sizes, using the midpoint of each unit type's size range; projects without a published mix are excluded from that figure only. Opening psf is the median of published starting psf across the 26 freehold and 20 leasehold projects that quote one, so treat it as indicative rather than a market average. The Continuum's 816 units and the district concentrations are from the same file.

The Serra Residences details — 133 units, freehold, Bassein Road in District 11, 28 storeys, 51,396 sq ft site, completion 4Q2030, previews 2 October and bookings 16 October 2026, acquired for $122 million in a 2010 collective sale — and the Mark Yip quotation are from EdgeProp, 29 September 2026. No pricing has been released. The Amberwood at Holland launch-weekend figures — 23 of 212 units at an average $3,019 psf — are from EdgeProp, 27 September 2026.

The directory is a snapshot of actively marketed projects, not a census of all private housing stock; it answers what a buyer can choose from today, which is a different question from the tenure composition of the 1.5 million homes already built. Mark Yip's 7% refers specifically to units launched in the first two quarters of 2026; the 10.6% here refers to units currently available across all marketed projects, which is why the two figures differ.