ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Assign1 Chen Yi Fan

Abstract

Singapore is well-known by its success public housing policy which has made impressive progress to change Singapore from “one of world’s worst slums – ‘a disgrace to a civilised community’” commented by British Housing Committee Report in 1947, to a country that more than 80% of population live in HDB (Housing and Development Board) flats, with 95% of them owning their HDB flat[1] .

Problem and Motivation

House is one of the essential requirements for everyone. In Singapore, the resale HDB flat, as readily available and wider selection options, plays an important role in the housing market especially for the families who want to settle down in a relative short time frame at an affordable price compared to the cost of the private houses.

Through this exercise, we would like to find out what are the overview of the resale flats market in Singapore in 2015 as well as compared to year 2016. For a house buyer, the first few questions might come up are:

1. What are the houses available in the market?
   1. What are the house sizes available?
   2. In which areas I should look for?
   3. When was the flat built?
   4. How big is the flat do I want to buy?
2. What are the prices of the houses?
   1. What is the current trend of resale flats price compared to the past years?
   2. Which areas’ house prices are more affordable?
   3. How does the floor level affect the house prices?
3. How do the above factors reflect in this year (2016) as compared to last year?

And so on, however, we focus mainly on the most pertinent questions as following:

1. Number of flats supplied vs type of the flats;
2. Number of flats supplied vs their locations;
3. Number of flats supplied vs their age;
4. Number of flats supplied vs their sizes;
5. The price of flats vs their year of sale;
6. The price of flats vs their locations;
7. The price of flats vs their floor level;

The answers of above questions play a critical role for buyers to decide their final purchase of a resale flat quickly and precisely, in order to suit for their diverse needs. In this article, we will give advice to a specified group of people who migrated to Singapore as professionals and are lucky enough to obtain their PR status in the past 2 years.

Approaches

To help these new migrations to answer the question of what are the houses available in the market and what are the house sizes available, we will use the data downloaded from data.gov.sg to give an insights to the resale flat market in Singapore.

Number of flats supplied vs type of the flats

From the Pareto chart shown below, we can observe that among all the7 types of the resales flats in year 2015, namely 1 to 5 Rooms, Executive and Multi-generation flats, 3 to 5-Room flats contribute 91.52% to the total resale flat market. Especially 4-Room flats with the total number of 7,142 out of all 17,785 units dominant majority portion of the resale market at 40.16%. It followed by 3-Room and 5-Room flats with 28.02% and 23.34% shares respectively.

Supply 2015