Singapore condo resale prices fall 0.4% in July, erasing June's gain

RESALE prices of non-landed private homes in Singapore eased 0.4 per cent in July 2016 over the previous month, based on SRX Property's flash estimate for last month released on Wednesday.

The drop contrasts with a revised 0.4 per cent month-on-month gain in the index for June 2016. SRX Property had earlier indicated a 0.5 per cent increase for June based on its flash estimate for that month.

The July price drop applied to all three geographical regions. Prices contracted 0.5 per cent in Core Central Region (CCR), 0.6 per cent in the city-fringe or Rest of Central Region (RCR) and 0.3 per cent in the suburbs or Outside Central Region (OCR).

Year on year, the July 2016 overall resale price index for non-landed private homes inched up 0.1 per cent compared with July 2015. The sub-indices for CCR and RCR posted year-on-year price hikes of 6.2 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively. That said, the sub-index for OCR slipped 2.8 per cent over the same period.

The overall price index for July was down 6.6 per cent from the recent peak in January 2014.

SRX Property estimated that 770 non-landed private homes were resold last month - up 10 per cent from the 700 units resold in June 2016.

Last month's estimated resale volume also translated to a year-on-year expansion of 31.4 per cent from the 586 units resold in July last year. However, last month's resale volume was down 62.4 per cent from the peak of 2,050 units in April 2010.

SRX Property's data also showed that the overall median Transaction over X-Value(TOX) worsened to negative S$10,000 in July 2016 from negative S$7,000 in June 2016.

The median TOX measures how much people are overpaying or underpaying against the computer-generated estimated market value or the so-called X value.