What a Cooling Measure Actually Does to Prices

Every time the market runs hot, the same advice circulates: wait for the next round of cooling measures and buy the dip. It is worth asking whether the dip has ever actually arrived. Since 2018 there have been three rounds of Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty increases, and on URA's own price index not one of them produced a meaningful fall in the level of prices. What they produced was roughly a year of slower growth.

The exception is instructive, and it is not a tax. Methodology published. No spin.

How this was measured

Everything below uses URA's private residential property price index, base quarter 2009-Q1 = 100, published quarterly and available in full from data.gov.sg. For each round we take the last quarter that was fully unaffected by the measure, then compare the four quarters of growth before it with the four quarters after it. Same index, same window on both sides.

Two honest caveats. The index is a stratified hedonic series, so it controls for unit size and age but not for everything. And no quarter in this data is a clean experiment: the 2021 round landed into a global inflation shock, and the 2023 round landed into the sharpest interest-rate cycle in two decades. Cooling measures are never the only thing happening.

The three ABSD rounds

Read the last column first. Across three rounds and twelve subsequent quarters, the worst single quarter was −0.7%. The index never fell more than a rounding error below its pre-measure level, and in every case it was back above that level within one or two quarters.

July 2018 is the round that came closest to working. The index sat at 149.0 in 2Q2018 after a 9.1% year. It then printed 149.7, 149.6, 148.6 — a drift, not a correction — bottoming 0.3% below the pre-measure level, before resuming. Full-year 2019 came in at +2.7%. The measure converted a 9% year into a 3% year; it did not give anyone a discount.

December 2021 barely registered. Prices rose 0.7% in the first quarter after, then 3.5%, then 3.8%. Full-year 2022 was +8.6%. This is the clearest evidence that a demand tax loses to a supply shortage and a wall of liquidity: the measure removed a slice of investment demand at exactly the moment owner-occupier demand and construction delays were doing the opposite.

April 2023 doubled ABSD for foreigners to 60% and produced exactly one negative quarter, −0.2%. Prices then went +0.8%, +2.8%, +1.4%. It reshaped who was buying — foreign purchase volumes collapsed — without moving the index down.

The one that worked was a credit rule

On 29 June 2013 the Total Debt Servicing Ratio framework capped total monthly debt at 60% of gross income and standardised how banks compute income and stress rates. The index peaked at 154.6 in 3Q2013 and fell to 136.6 by 2Q2017 — −11.6% over fifteen consecutive quarters, the longest decline in the modern series.

That is what an actual correction looks like, and the difference in mechanism is the whole point. A stamp duty raises the price of transacting for a defined group of buyers. Those buyers step aside, are replaced, or absorb the cost. A debt-servicing rule lowers the maximum price every buyer can bid, including the ones you are competing with. One removes bidders. The other removes bids.

The same logic runs through the 30 September 2022 package, which raised the interest-rate floor used in TDSR and MSR calculations — a credit measure dressed as a cooling measure, and one of the quieter reasons the 2023 slowdown eventually stuck.

What waiting cost

If you had held off buying for four quarters after each round, hoping for the correction, this is what the same home cost you by the time you gave up. Figures on a S$1,500,000 target, applying the index move over each window.

Waiting was never free and twice it was expensive. That is not an argument for buying in a hurry — it is an argument for deciding on your own numbers rather than on a policy calendar.

What is actually moving prices in 2026

Prices rose 0.5% in 2Q2026 after 0.9% in 1Q, a cumulative 1.4% for the first half, below the 1.8% of 1H2025 (URA). No new cooling measure caused that. Three things did.

• Supply. 9,320 private units on the 2026 Confirmed List, over 50% above the ten-year average, with about 60,600 units expected to complete in the coming years.
• Vacancy. 6.4% at end-2Q2026, up from 6.2%, with occupied stock actually shrinking by 387 units in the quarter.
• Rate relief that cuts both ways. Cheap money supports prices, but it also makes holding an empty investment unit survivable, which keeps stock on the market rather than off it.

Government Land Sales is doing what three ABSD rounds could not: changing the number of homes, not the number of buyers. Supply is the slower instrument and the one that shows up in the index years later — which is exactly why it is under-discussed.

What to do with this

If your plan is to wait for the next round of measures to deliver a lower price, the last eight years say it will deliver a slower year instead, and you will pay for the wait. If a measure is going to change your position, the ones to watch are the credit rules — TDSR, LTV, the stress-rate floor — because those change what you and every rival bidder can borrow, and they show up in your loan approval within weeks.

The tax rounds change who is in the room. The credit rounds change what everyone in the room can pay.

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Index figures are URA's private residential property price index (all residential, whole island), base 2009-Q1 = 100, as published on data.gov.sg and current to 2Q2026. All percentage moves computed from the published index levels rather than quoted from secondary reports.