SINGAPORE – An almost 30-year-old Housing Board (HDB) jumbo flat in Yishun changed hands for $1.038 million last month, making it the second flat in a non-mature estate to cross the million-dollar mark.
The 187 sq m executive apartment at Block 652 Yishun Avenue 4 sits on the fourth floor of a 12-storey block.
PropNex property agent Arissa Tan and ERA Realty property agent Frederick Neo, who jointly closed the deal, told The Straits Times that in the two to three weeks the unit was up on the market, they had received an average of five inquires a day.
The duo had listed the unit at an asking price of $1.05 million.
“To shortlist serious buyers for viewings, we told potential buyers that we were only looking at offers above $1 million and most were actually okay with it because they knew that such jumbo flats were rare,” said Ms Tan, who has been in the industry for two years.
In total, they had three offers starting from $990,000 from three groups of buyers. They accepted the final offer of $1.038 million after rejecting two previous offers.
HDB had valued the unit at $930,000, which meant that the buyers paid $108,000 in cash over valuation.
The sellers are a middle-aged Singaporean couple who are moving to live closer to their adult children.
To extend the living space, they had purchased the recess area in front of their unit and turned it into a “mini garden”.
The jumbo unit, which is a combination of a three-room and four-room flat, has four bedrooms, three toilets and two separate living room areas.
It has around 69 years and four months left on its lease and is within walking distance of Yishun Park and Khoo Teck Puat Hospital.
Mr Neo, who has been in the industry for nine months, said the sellers were very emotionally attached to the flat because their children had grown up there, so both he and Ms Tan had aimed to get a good price so the sellers could have enough cash to pay for their next home.
“Generally, HDB flats move quite fast in this market but to get $1 million in Yishun in such a short time is still quite surprising,” he said.
Jumbo HDB flats, which each combines two units, were first introduced by the HDB in 1989 in an effort to clear the oversupply of flats in areas such as Yishun and Woodlands.
There are only about an estimated 2,900 jumbo flats in Singapore, which make them very highly sought after.
The first million-dollar HDB resale transaction in a non-mature estate was in Hougang in January 2018.
Then, a 177 sq m two-storey executive maisonette at Block 851 Hougang Central sold for $1 million.
The latest $1.038 million transaction marks the first time a unit in Yishun has sold for at least $1 million, a price tag that is usually found in popular mature estates such as Bishan, Toa Payoh, Queenstown and the central area where The Pinnacle@Duxton is located.
As at Thursday (March 10), a total of 59 HDB resale flats have been sold for at least $1 million this year.
So far, the highest price on record is a $1.36 million five-room Design, Build and Sell Scheme flat at Natura Loft in Bishan that was sold in December last year.
In 2021, a total of 259 HDB flats changed hands for at least $1 million, the highest number of such flats on record so far and more than three times the 82 units in 2020.
The record-breaking number came on the back of a buoyant property market and rising prices, which prompted the authorities to introduce a set of property cooling measures at the tail-end of last year.
However, the steady clip of million-dollar flats changing hands appears to have hardly slackened, with at least 29 such flats recorded last month, up from the 27 units in January.
But such transactions remain extremely rare in non-mature estates such as Yishun and it could take some time before another deal is lodged.
Ms Christine Sun, senior vice-president of research and analytics at real estate firm OrangeTee & Tie, said that while 12 flats in Yishun were sold at price tags above $800,000 last year compared with the one or two units in previous years, the number is still relatively small in the overall supply of resale flats in the estate.
The median price of five-room flats in Yishun currently hovers around $573,000, said Ms Sun, citing HDB data.
“Therefore, the probability of seeing many flats in Yishun sold for more than $1 million may not be big,” she added.
“Source: [Yishun HDB jumbo flat sold for over $1m, 2nd unit in non-mature estate to cross million-dollar mark] © Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Permission required for reproduction”
