It's just a one-time boost, not a boom: October jump in private home sales won't last until December

Property buyers ignore cooling measures and snap houses with 1,587 private transactions in October, up from just 911 in September.

In a statement, Adam Tan, Corporate Communications Manager at PropNex Realty, cautioned against thinking that the sales will continue in this vein for the rest of the year. “The main reason we saw such a high sales figure for October,” he explains, “is due to the launch of two Executive Condominiums (ECs): Esparina Residences, which sold a whopping 425 units, and The Canopy, which sold 104 units.

“With the reintroduction of ECs after a five-year hiatus, demand was expected to be high as the sandwich class of those whose household incomes exceeded HDB’s $8,000 ceiling shrunk from the increasingly expensive mass market projects and flocked to the more affordable ECs.”

The third in the top three projects (by sales volume) for October was The Glyndebourne, which sold 112 units. Located at Dunearn Road in the Core Central Region, its median sale price of $2,149psf was a reasonable price tag that attracted so many higher-end investors.

Tan pointed out that the three projects, Esparina Residences, The Canopy and The Glyndebourne, accounted for 641 units between them or just over 40% of the total number of units sold.

“The property cooling measures are still effective,” Tan said, adding, “Without the three aforementioned projects, as well as a few other projects that sold just over the $1,000psf mark such as The Lanai and Vacanza @ East, the number of units sold would have been more in line with the expected 800 units or so.”

Besides such similar occurrences such as reintroduced ECs and irresistibly-priced projects, Tan observed that the market is beginning to settle down after the cooling measures and that we can see that it will be the more serious investors and homeowners who account for the new purchases from now on.

Given that about 250 units from The Lakeshore Residences have been sold in the first half of November, Tan forecasts about 600 units to be sold in November 2010, pending further attractively-priced launches.