Where HDB Flats Continue to Hold Value Despite Ageing Leases

The “99-year time bomb” has been a topic of public discussion as far back as the 1990s. We all know that HDB flats have 99-year leases, so what happens when they get older?

Given that the value of a property typically falls as its lease runs down, surely at some point, the market price of an HDB flat will start falling and eventually might hit zero. This issue takes on a more urgent tone as we progress into 2026 and beyond.

This is because no more flats will be redeveloped under the government’s Selective En-bloc Redevelopment Scheme (SERS). The SERS programme was once considered the saviour of ageing flats, as it meant older flats would be redeveloped and owners compensated with newer flats nearby. But now that it’s gone, there may be no more “hope premium” even in the best located but ageing flats. 

Despite this, we’ve noticed something odd about HDB flat prices. Based on HDB resale data, there are a small group of flats that – for inexplicable reasons – refuse to see price drops despite ever-growing lease decay.

In this article, we’re going to try to pinpoint where they are, and try to identify why they’re able to defy time and an expiring lease:

How our analysis will be conducted

We will use a lease-adjusted framework, which is to say, we’re going to compare flats only to other flats ageing at the same speed. We’re also going to confine our data to flats older than 10 years, as flats younger than this are too new to have any significant lease decay effect on their prices.

Bear in mind that our goal is not to identify which flats are the most expensive, but rather, which flats have fared better or worse than their remaining lease would normally suggest.

Regarding the phrase “defying lease decay,” we aren’t simply referring to whether an old flat’s price keeps going up. Rather, we refer to flats that – after factoring in age – continue to sell at much higher prices than the remaining leases suggest they should. 

Flats with this trait are likely to be structural defiers, or flats with features that are not easily replicated. Think very large unit sizes, rare layouts, being next to MRT stations, or in mature town centres. While this doesn’t make them immune to lease decay, the unique qualities of these flats make them more resilient to it. 

Which older HDB flats truly outperformed their peers?

We’ll see that – even after accounting for lease decay and overall market movements – some cohorts of flats clearly perform better than they should. Instead of dumping every town and flat-type combination on you, we’ll add clarity by focusing only on the clearest, most telling cases.

Below, we show specifically where:

• Older flats outperformed younger flats within the same town
• A difference in price growth of at least 5%

By doing this, we isolate cases where age should have been a disadvantage, but was not.

So that the tables are easier to read, we’ll highlight the exact rows where this sort of outperformance occurs. 

3-room flats