At first glance, Singapore’s residential market data suggests that demand from Chinese buyers has declined sharply. That is true for one group: mainland Chinese nationals buying as foreigners. It is much less true for Chinese permanent residents, new citizens and families buying homes for long-term residence. A smaller, harder-to-measure segment also buys through trusts for identifiable beneficiaries, including US-citizen children who receive treaty-based stamp-duty treatment.
So the clearest description of today’s sentiment is selective commitment, not a broad retreat. Chinese-linked demand is still present, but it is more resident-led, more tax-sensitive and more focused on wealth preservation than it was before Singapore doubled the Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty (ABSD) for most foreign buyers to 60 per cent in April 2023.
The headline data: Chinese foreign purchases have fallen, while PR demand has held up
The Business Times’ compilation of URA caveats and Realion research shows the shift in non-landed private-home transactions. Executive condominiums are excluded.
| Period | Total Chinese buyers | Bought as PR | Bought as foreigner | Chinese share of all buyers | Chinese share of all PR buyers | Chinese share of all foreign buyers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 1,744 | 1,375 | 369 | 5.9% | 33.8% | 29.4% |
| 2022 | 1,372 | 1,118 | 254 | 7.0% | 32.2% | 28.3% |
| 2023 | 1,121 | 939 | 182 | 6.3% | 30.8% | 29.4% |
| 2024 | 1,035 | 1,000 | 35 | 5.2% | 31.1% | 13.0% |
| 2025 | 1,183 | 1,145 | 38 | 4.9% | 31.5% | 12.7% |
| Jan-Aug 2026 | 651 | 635 | 16 | 5.1% | 30.6% | 8.8% |
Source: URA/Realion data reproduced in The Business Times. Caveat: these are transaction records, not a count of unique people.
Three conclusions stand out.
First, direct foreign demand has been hit hardest. Purchases by Chinese foreigners fell from 369 in 2021 to 38 in 2025, a decline of almost 90 per cent. There were only 16 in the first eight months of 2026. Their share of all foreign purchases also dropped from roughly 29 per cent in 2021-23 to 8.8 per cent in January-August 2026.
Second, demand from Chinese PRs has been far more stable. PRs accounted for 1,145 transactions in 2025, up 14.5 per cent from 2024, and represented almost 97 per cent of Chinese purchases that year. Chinese buyers have also continued to make up about 31 per cent of all PR buyers. This looks less like speculative offshore demand and more like housing demand from people who already live, work or plan to remain in Singapore.
Third, 2025 brought a modest rebound but not a return to the old cycle. Total Chinese transactions rose 14.3 per cent from 2024, yet remained 32 per cent below 2021. A straight-line annualisation of January-August 2026 gives roughly 977 transactions, below 2025, although project-launch timing and seasonality make that only a directional guide.
This is why broad claims that Chinese buyers have either returned in force or withdrawn entirely fail to capture the market’s more nuanced reality.
How many Chinese buyers come from ABSD treaty countries?
Singapore does not publish a current annual table showing every residential purchase by the five treaty-country nationalities, nor does it identify how many such buyers are ethnically Chinese or beneficiaries of family trusts.
The best official aggregate disclosure remains a July 2023 parliamentary reply. The Ministry of Finance said that about 250 property transactions a year received ABSD remission under the US-Singapore and Singapore-EFTA free trade agreements from 2018 through 2022. That implies approximately 1,250 transactions over five years. They represented about 2.5 per cent of transactions that attracted ABSD, with around S$150 million remitted each year. The reply did not provide annual counts or a split by nationality. It also counted transactions, not unique citizens.
The eligible profiles are:
- US nationals; and
- nationals and permanent residents of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
They receive the same ABSD treatment as Singapore citizens; this is a remission, not a blanket exemption from all stamp duties. On a first Singapore residential property, the citizen-rate ABSD is zero, but the rate is 20 per cent on a second property and 30 per cent on a third or subsequent property. Buyer’s Stamp Duty still applies.
Is the treaty-country trend rising or falling?
The issue with the official aggregate is that it is not detailed or recent enough to establish a nationwide year-by-year trend after 2022. A useful, but narrower, proxy is US buying in the Core Central Region (CCR), where treaty-eligible demand matters most. PropNex/URA Realis data reported by EdgeProp recorded 54 US caveats in 2019, 59 in 2020, 91 in 2021, 130 in 2022, 110 in 2023 and 36 in the first half of 2024. Swiss purchases were in single digits or low double digits, while Norwegian purchases were negligible in the same sample.
That proxy shows a climb to a 2022 peak followed by a decline, not a continuously rising trend. Yet Americans became more dominant within a much smaller foreign-buyer pool: they accounted for 36 of the CCR’s 64 foreign, non-PR purchases in the first half of 2024. In other words, the count weakened after 2022 while the relative importance of US buyers increased.
This CCR series should not be presented as the national total. It excludes the Rest of Central Region, Outside Central Region, landed homes and transactions without caveats. It also cannot reveal whether a US buyer is of Chinese heritage or whether family money originated in China.
What a trust purchase through a US-citizen child actually means
The Business Times reported that some Chinese families have acquired residential property through trusts for US-born children, including very young children. The attraction is clear: a qualifying US citizen receives Singapore-citizen ABSD treatment under the US-Singapore FTA.
But describing the child simply as a “purchaser” can be misleading. The trustee is the legal acquirer. To obtain a refund of ABSD paid by the trustee, the child must be an identifiable individual beneficiary with a vested, irrevocable and unconditional beneficial interest in the property. A discretionary beneficiary, contingent interest or unborn child does not qualify. The property is also added to the beneficiary’s Singapore residential property count.
The cash-flow burden is substantial. A trustee currently pays 65 per cent ABSD upfront and applies for a refund—generally within six months—of the difference between that amount and the ABSD due based on the highest-profile beneficial owner. A trust for a qualifying US-citizen child buying a first Singapore home may therefore end with zero ABSD if every condition is met, but the family must first fund the 65 per cent payment and accept that the child genuinely owns the beneficial interest.
This is a lawful planning route when properly structured, not a reliable proxy for secret market-wide demand. One law firm cited by The Business Times had handled roughly 80 such transactions in 18 months and said its trust volume had grown about 20 per cent year on year. Those figures show the structure exists, but they are firm-level anecdotes amid tens of thousands of conveyancing transactions. No public dataset isolates Chinese-funded, US-beneficiary trust purchases.
Beijing’s trust-tax crackdown changes the calculation
The new source of uncertainty is not Singapore’s ABSD alone. China tightened the tax treatment and reporting of offshore trusts in July 2026. KPMG’s analysis describes a 20 per cent individual income-tax treatment at several stages of a trust’s life, alongside reporting and payment requirements that can reach Chinese tax residents even when assets sit offshore.
That helps explain the sudden cooling in trust enquiries reported by Singapore lawyers after the announcement. Families are now assessing at least four risks at once: Singapore stamp duty, China’s offshore-income tax rules, beneficial-ownership disclosure and the long-term legal consequences of vesting property in a child.
The near-term effect is likely to be fewer rushed trust purchases and longer advisory cycles—not necessarily a wholesale sale of Singapore assets. Existing owners may still regard Singapore as a stable place to live and preserve wealth, but the route used to hold that wealth has become more complicated.
The wider Singapore market is not dependent on Chinese foreigners
The broader private-home market remains overwhelmingly local and PR-driven. Savills counted 20,154 non-landed purchases by Singapore citizens in 2025, 3,614 by PRs and only 297 by foreigners. Foreigners were just 1.2 per cent of transactions, despite a 10 per cent increase from a very low 2024 base. In the second quarter of 2026, foreign purchases fell 27 per cent quarter-on-quarter to 65 and again represented about 1.2 per cent of the market.
This matters for sentiment. Chinese-linked wealth can have an outsized effect on selected luxury projects, Good Class Bungalows and prime-district resale stock, but it is not the engine of nationwide transaction volume or price growth. Most demand is still coming from Singapore citizens and PRs.
Chinese capital may also move into commercial, industrial or qualifying commercial shophouse assets, which sit outside residential ABSD. That can preserve Singapore’s appeal as an investment destination even when foreign residential purchases remain subdued. However, activity in those sectors should not be used as evidence of a residential recovery.
What market participants should watch next?
The clearest indications of changing demand come from tracking the following transaction measures:
- Chinese PR transactions. Continued strength would confirm that resident-led demand remains the core of the segment.
- Chinese foreigner caveats. A sustained move above the 2024-26 trough would be the clearest evidence of a direct foreign-buyer recovery.
- US-national caveats in the CCR. These are the best visible proxy for treaty-supported prime demand, although they do not identify Chinese heritage or funding.
- Trust-remission disclosures. A newer government breakdown by year, nationality and beneficiary profile would materially improve transparency.
- Completed deals versus enquiries. Enquiries show interest; options exercised and caveats lodged show demand that has cleared tax, financing and compliance hurdles.
- Residential versus commercial allocation. Chinese capital can remain committed to Singapore while avoiding residential property altogether.
Bottom line
Sentiment among Chinese buyers is cautious, but not uniformly negative. Direct purchases by mainland Chinese foreigners are at a fraction of their pre-2023 level. Chinese PR demand, by contrast, has remained resilient and rose in 2025. Treaty-eligible purchasers—especially Americans—retain an important position in the small prime foreign-buyer market, but the latest official nationwide total is only the roughly 1,250 remission transactions disclosed for 2018-22, and the available CCR proxy points to a peak in 2022 followed by lower volumes.
Trust purchases for US-citizen children are real, legally constrained and statistically opaque. Beijing’s 2026 offshore-trust tax measures are likely to cool this niche further, at least while families seek advice. The best description of the property market is still resident-led resilience, with a weak foreign-national channel and a more hesitant trust channel.
Disclaimer and methodology note: “Chinese buyers” in transaction datasets normally means nationality, not ethnicity or source of funds. Caveats are not lodged for every transaction, and a trust may record the trustee rather than the family member funding the acquisition. Counts from different sources and market segments should therefore not be added together. This article is market commentary, not legal or tax advice.
Article contributed by Jerry Wong.
Jerry Wong is a realtor at Propnex Realty, bringing a rich background in interior and lighting design to his work. He loves exploring diverse spaces and observing the transformative power of real estate. Beyond his professional role, Jerry finds his greatest fulfillment in connecting people with the right properties, gaining immense satisfaction from helping clients achieve their dreams.
