It is well known that the majority of Singaporeans live in public housing (that is, housing provided by the Housing and Development Board, or HDB). However, what you may not know is that the majority of residents obtain their housing through a model that shares some high-level similarities with the way we deliver new condominiums in Toronto.
In 2001, the HDB introduced a program known as Build-to-Order (BTO). The way it works is fairly straightforward: the HDB announces a new project, prospective buyers apply and are assigned a queue number, and then, if they're selected, they get to buy. Once a sufficient number of "pre-sales" have been obtained, the project begins construction, and buyers get a brand-new, subsidized apartment in 3 to 5 years.
Singapore also mandates that the apartments must be owner-occupied and so, in this carefully controlled delivery model, supply very closely mirrors demand. This is different from traditional condominium pre-sales where some buyers might be end users, some might be planning to rent out the home, and some might want to sell immediately upon completion. In those markets, the risk of overbuilding and speculative volatility is greater.
HDB classifies the apartments themselves into three groups: Standard, Plus, and Prime. This classification is meant to reflect the locational value of certain projects; but importantly, the intent is that they're all equally attainable to citizens. The difference is that "choicer" locations (their vocabulary — now you have a new Scrabble word) require greater subsidies to make them affordable, and so they come with additional obligations.
For example, in the case of Prime flats, there is a subsidy recovery upon any future sale (I'm told it's between 6-9% of the first resale price), the minimum occupation period (MOP) is 10 years (versus 5 for the Standard class), and you can never ever rent out the whole home, even once the MOP has lapsed. Once again, this is about strictly matching new supply to end-user demand.
It's a lot of rules. But in Singapore, the majority of people accept them in exchange for affordability.
Cover photo: Tengah, Singapore via Monocle
Howard Chai recently reported in the Globe and Mail on the number of "distressed" commercial real estate transactions that Canada has seen over the last few years:
2023: 119 transactions totalling $767 million
2024: 191 transactions totalling more than $1.5 billion
2025: 252 transactions totalling more than $1.42 billion
These numbers are from Altus Group and they, importantly, only include sales involving a court proceeding. They do not include properties sold at a loss because of financial distress or any other such scenarios. This means that the actual amount of "distress" in the market is certainly greater. We're all just holding on.
The hardest-hit asset class is, not surprisingly, development land. This makes sense because the value of development land is mostly binary right now. Either you can do something productive with it (in which case there's value) or you can't, and it's illiquid. Land is risky. It just doesn't seem that way when the market is hot.
The theme of the article is that the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. Jeremiah Shamess of Colliers is cited as saying he thinks we will see the "emergence of a bottom" late this year or early into 2027. He must have read my annual predictions post in January, where I argued the same.
These periods of time always suck for everyone involved. But as is always the case in markets, the faster we deal with the pain, the faster we'll get to the other side. Failure is an essential part of capitalism. As many have said: "Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."
Cover photo by Damian Kravchuk on Unsplash
Read through planning documents across North America and you're bound to find language that refers to low-rise residential neighbourhoods as "physically stable areas" where the "existing neighbourhood character" is paramount. But to be more precise, what this kind of language is actually saying is not that these neighbourhoods need to be broadly stable; it is saying that they just need to look more or less stable.
Here in Toronto, for example, it has been widely documented that many of our low-rise neighbourhoods are losing people. Household sizes are getting smaller, and houses that used to be subdivided are being returned to single-family use. A similar thing is happening in other cities like New York:
Bloomberg News recently reported that since 2004, at least 9,300 homes have been lost as a result of multi-family buildings getting "rolled up" into single-family homes. More recently, the city has even seen an increase in people combining two or more buildings into large urban mansions.
And while the total number of homes removed is relatively small for New York as a whole, it can be quite impactful to individual neighbourhoods. In the West Village, where there's a high concentration of rowhomes and townhouses, Bloomberg estimates that one out of every six small apartment buildings has been rolled up into a single-family home since 2004!
From a built form standpoint, you could say these are "physically stable" areas that are obediently adhering to their existing neighbourhood character. But under the hood and behind their street walls, they are clearly changing.
It is one of the great ironies of city building. People often fear new development because they worry it might disrupt the character of a neighbourhood. But preventing development does not guarantee stasis. In fact, we know that not building new housing actually increases the pressures felt on a city's existing housing stock, as people compete for a more fixed amount of supply.
The wealthy can always outbid the less wealthy on housing. So if you don't provide any new options, the wealthy will just buy up the existing stuff and turn it into what they want. Alternatively, you can build more housing and create a "moving chain" that frees up more existing housing for people of lower incomes.
Cover photo by Chanan Greenblatt on Unsplash
Map from Bloomberg