Insights

Lease Decay, Properly: What 99 Years Is Worth at 60 Years Left

A 99-year lease does not lose value in a straight line. The curve is gentle for decades, then bends — and by the time a condo has 60 years left it has quietly shed about a sixth of its fresh-lease value, with the buyer pool starting to thin. Here is the curve, and what it means for your exit.

By TRIBE Editorial · 24 July 2026 · 8 min read

Ask most buyers how a 99-year lease loses value and they will draw a straight line: one ninety-ninth of the value gone each year, all the way to zero. That mental model is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that costs money. Leasehold value follows a curve, not a slope — barely perceptible in the first few decades, then steepening as the lease runs down. By the time a condo has 60 years left, it has quietly given up about a sixth of what the same unit would fetch on a fresh 99-year lease — and, more importantly, the pool of people who can buy it has started to shrink. Here is the actual curve, why it bends, and what it means for when you should sell. Methodology published. No spin.

What Bala's Table actually is

The reference every professional valuer, the Singapore Land Authority and CPF lean on is Bala's Table (formally the leasehold relativity table). It expresses a leasehold's value as a percentage of the equivalent freehold, by years remaining. The headline anchors most people half-remember are roughly right: a fresh 99-year lease is about 96% of freehold, a 60-year lease about 80%, and a 30-year lease about 60% (SLA / Bala's Table, 99.co).

Because a brand-new 99-year unit already starts below freehold, the more useful frame for a leasehold owner is value relative to a fresh 99-year lease — what your unit is worth today against an identical one with the clock reset. On that basis the curve looks like this:

Years left on lease	Value vs a fresh 99-year lease
99 (fresh)	100%
90	97%
80	94%
70	90%
60	84%
50	76%
40	67%
30	55%

The numbers are model relativities, not a promise about price — actual transacted prices also move with the market, the district and the specific project. But the shape is the point.

Why the curve isn't a straight line

A straight line would take off 1% of value a year. Bala's Table does nothing of the sort, because a lease is a claim on future use, and value is the present worth of that future. Losing a year at the far end of a 99-year lease removes a year of enjoyment that was decades away and heavily discounted — almost nothing. Losing a year when only 30 remain removes a year that is close, valuable and irreplaceable. The same twelve months are worth far more near the end than near the start.

Read as the pace of loss per decade, the acceleration is stark:

Decade of the lease	Value shed that decade (as a share of its value entering the decade)
99 → 89 years	about 3%
79 → 69 years	about 5%
69 → 59 years	about 7%
59 → 49 years	about 9%
49 → 39 years	about 13%
39 → 29 years	about 18%

In annual terms, a lease around 68 years left is decaying at roughly 0.6% a year; around 58 years, about 0.9% a year; and by 30 years, about 2.4% a year — four times faster than at the start. The decay is not a background hum that stays constant. It is a curve that bends against you, gently at first and then sharply.

The 60-year mark is where the buyer pool starts to thin

Here is the part the value table alone does not show, and the part that actually governs your exit: as the lease shortens, fewer people are allowed to pay full price for it.

Two financing rules do the work. First, CPF. You can use CPF to buy a leasehold only if the remaining lease covers the youngest buyer until age 95; below that (but at 20 years or more remaining) CPF use is pro-rated, and under 20 years it is barred entirely (CPF via CheckHowMuch). Do the arithmetic and the squeeze falls on the young. At 60 years remaining, a buyer must be at least 35 years old to draw full CPF (35 + 60 = 95); a 30-year-old is pro-rated. Every year the lease drops, that age threshold rises and another slice of younger buyers — the people who bid most aggressively for a family home — needs more cash and can offer less.

Second, bank financing. Loan tenure cannot run past the point where the lease nears expiry, and most banks want the lease to have a comfortable buffer (commonly at least 30 years remaining at the end of the loan) before lending at full loan-to-value. As a lease approaches 30 years, tenures shorten, loan-to-value caps fall, and below that band mortgages become difficult to secure at all (Dollarback Mortgage).

So the 60-year mark is a double signal. It is where Bala's curve starts to bend, and where the natural, CPF-and-loan-funded buyer pool starts to narrow — which is precisely when a seller finds it takes longer, and a bigger discount, to move the unit.

Worked on a real ageing leasehold

Take Pine Grove, a 660-unit former HUDC estate off Ulu Pandan completed in 1984. As of 2026 it has roughly 57 years left on its lease — right on the lip of the 60-year threshold (PropertyGuru). On Bala's relativity that puts a unit at about 82% of its fresh-99 value: if an identical, reset-lease unit would fetch S$1,900,000 today, the 57-year version is worth about S$1,560,000 — the roughly 18% gap is the lease, priced.

That is not a disaster; a well-located ageing leasehold can still see its price rise with the market. What changes is the trajectory and the liquidity. From here, this unit loses close to 1% of value a year to decay alone, accelerating each year, while the age threshold for full-CPF buyers keeps climbing. A holder who plans to sell "someday" is quietly racing the curve. (Braddell View, on a 99-year lease with about 61 years left, sits in the same zone — which is exactly why estates of this vintage so often turn to collective sale: an en-bloc is the market's way of resetting the lease before the curve does real damage — COS.sg.)

What to actually do with this

Match your holding period to the curve, not to the calendar. The cheapest decade to own a leasehold is the flat top of the curve; the most expensive is the steep tail. If you are buying an older 99-year unit, know which part of the curve you are entering and plan your exit before it bends — not after.

Watch the buyer pool, not just the price. Your exit price is set by who is allowed to bid. Crossing under the CPF and financing thresholds removes bidders, and a unit with fewer eligible buyers sells slower and softer regardless of what the value table says.

Don't confuse "still going up" with "no decay." A rising market can mask lease decay for years; the two are separate forces moving in opposite directions. When the market pauses, the decay is all that is left — and by then the curve is steeper than it was when you bought.

You can see how tenure interacts with everything else — district, size, MRT, schools — in the Resale Project Scorecard, which scores every resale condo on the data rather than the sales pitch. A short lease is not automatically a bad buy; it is a priced one. The mistake is paying the fresh-lease price for a curve that has already started to bend.

Sources: Bala's Table leasehold relativity (99-year ≈ 96%, 60-year ≈ 80%, 30-year ≈ 60% of freehold) per the SLA reference document and 99.co. The fresh-99 relativity curve and per-decade decay figures are computed by TRIBE from the leasehold-relativity table used in the Resale Project Scorecard. CPF leasehold-usage rules (cover youngest buyer to age 95; pro-ration below; barred under 20 years) per CheckHowMuch; bank-financing tenure and loan-to-value tightening per Dollarback Mortgage. Pine Grove (TOP 1984, ~57 years remaining) per PropertyGuru; Braddell View lease per COS.sg. Values are model relativities, illustrative and not a valuation or financial advice; verify your own position with a licensed valuer, CPF and your bank.

Silas Tan is a District Director at Huttons Asia and co-founder of TRIBE. He built the Resale Project Scorecard (RPS) and New Project Scorecard (NPS) on URA transacted data. This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial or investment advice. CEA Registration R000303I.