The $500,000 Four-Room Is Back. The Twenty Years of Lease Are Not.

The sub-$500,000 four-room flat was supposed to be finished. In 2017, four in five four-room resales cleared below that line. By 2025 it was one in twenty, and the obvious extrapolation was zero.

It did not go to zero. Take every resale transaction HDB has registered since January 2017 — 243,399 of them — and the share of four-room flats changing hands below $500,000 bottomed at 3.6% in September 2025. In September 2026 it was 9.2%. In the 679 four-room resales registered so far in October, it is 11.5%.

The median four-room price across those same months did not move. It was $640,000 in September 2025 and $628,000 in September 2026. The middle of the market is where it was. The bottom of it came back.

The floor moved and the middle did not

The tenth percentile is the cleanest read on the bottom of a distribution, because it ignores the handful of distressed sales below it and the whole upper half above it.

The tenth percentile fell $35,000 over thirteen months. The median fell $12,000, which on this sample is noise. Whatever is happening is happening to the cheapest tenth of the four-room market and almost nowhere else.

That is consistent with the index. HDB's Q3 2026 flash estimate put the Resale Price Index at 202.4, down 0.2% on the quarter and falling for a third consecutive quarter, while resale volume rose 17.7% — more flats trading, at a slightly softer average. (HDB, 30 September 2026) An index that drifts down while the bottom decile drops six times as fast is not a market getting cheaper. It is a market whose cheap end is being restocked with something different.

Hold the lease still

The honest test is to compare flats with comparable lease remaining, because a four-room flat is not one product. Restrict the sample to four-room flats with at least 70 years of lease left — a flat built in 2000 or later — and the sub-$500,000 category is not recovering. It is extinct.

Sixty-five flats in ten months, out of 5,849. The long-lease four-room flat under $500,000 is a rounding error, and it did not come back — it went from 0.6% to 1.1%, which is forty flats.

So the entire recovery at the bottom sits in the short-lease band. Of the 773 four-room flats sold below $500,000 in the twelve months to October 2026, 60% had less than 60 years of lease remaining.

What the money actually buys

Set the two ends of the series side by side. In 2017 the median flat in this category cost $388,000 and had 78.2 years of lease left. In 2026 it costs $475,000 and has 59.0 years left.

Per remaining year of lease, that is $4,964 in 2017 against $8,051 in 2026 — up 62%. The buyer at the bottom of the four-room market is paying 22% more in cash for 19 fewer years of tenure. Against the median four-room flat sold in the same twelve months, which carries 74.4 years, the sub-$500,000 flat is short by more than fifteen years.

It is also lower and slightly smaller. Of the 773, 488 (63%) sold from the sixth storey down, and the median floor area is 90 sqm against 93 sqm for all four-room resales.

Four towns, and eight with none

The category is not spread across the island. Four towns produced 506 of the 773 flats — 65.5%.

Eight towns recorded none at all: Bukit Timah, Central Area, Marine Parade, Pasir Ris, Punggol, Sengkang, Serangoon and Tampines. In Punggol, Sengkang and Pasir Ris that is because the stock is too new to have decayed into the price band. In the Central Area and Bukit Timah it is because nothing there is cheap.

The lease is a financing term, not a detail

A 59-year lease is not simply "less time". It changes what the flat can be paid for with.

CPF savings may only be used in full where the remaining lease covers the youngest buyer to age 95. At 59 years, that means a buyer aged 36 or older. A 32-year-old couple buying the median flat in this category has a lease that runs out at 91, and their CPF usage is pro-rated accordingly — which converts part of the discount into a cash requirement. The headline price fell; the cash portion of it did not fall as far.

The loan tenure is not the binding constraint: HDB caps an HDB housing loan at the shortest of 25 years, 65 minus the average buyer age, or the remaining lease minus 20 years. On a 59-year lease that last test gives 39 years, so the 25-year cap still governs. (HDB) The lease bites through CPF and through resale liquidity in fifteen years' time, not through the monthly instalment today.

What this is and is not

It is not a return of affordability. The flats that made the four-room market affordable in 2017 — long lease, mid-floor, anywhere on the island — are gone from this price band and did not come back. Among flats with 70 years or more of lease, 1.1% sold below $500,000 this year against 76.6% in 2017.

What came back is a different product that happens to share a price tag: a 59-year lease, on a low floor, in Yishun, Woodlands, Jurong West or Bukit Batok. For a buyer in their late thirties or forties who intends to live in it and not to sell it on, that is a legitimate thing to buy, and it is cheaper per month than almost anything else in the market. For a 30-year-old treating $480,000 as the 2017 entry price returning, the arithmetic has changed underneath the number.

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Computed from HDB's full resale transaction register, Resale Flat Prices (January 2017 onwards) on data.gov.sg — 243,399 registrations from January 2017 to October 2026, retrieved 23 October 2026. "Trailing twelve months" is November 2025 to October 2026 inclusive; October 2026 is a partial month and is marked as such wherever it appears alone. Remaining lease is taken from the register's own field at the date of registration. Prices are as transacted, not inflation-adjusted.