PRICES of Singapore private homes cooled off in the fourth quarter, rising at a slower pace of 6.6 per cent.
Reflecting the hiatus in the property market, the gain was lower than the 8.3 per cent recorded for July-September, after the government moved to cool the red-hot property sector.
For the year 2007 as a whole, the price index rose 31 per cent, according to flash estimates of the price index for private residential property released by the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) on Wednesday.
Prices of non-landed private residential properties increased by 7 per cent in the Core Central Region, 7.3 per cent in Rest of Central Region and 7.5% in Outside Central Region in the last quarter.
In comparison with the third quarter, prices of non-landed private residential properties rose by 8.3 per cent in the core central region, and 7.9 per cent respectively in the other two regions.
The flash estimates are compiled based on transaction prices given in caveats lodged during the first ten weeks of the quarter supplemented by information on the number of new units sold.
The statistics will be updated four weeks later when URA releases the full 4th quarter 2007 real estate statistics, when more data on the caveats lodged and the take-up of new projects are captured.
On the supply side, there are about 65,400 private residential units in the pipeline, of which about 41,600 new private housing units are expected to be completed between 2008 and 2010.
About 38,000 units of the supply in the pipeline (or 58 per cent) have not been sold by developers yet.
This does not take into account new sites that will be made available for development through the Government Land Sales (GLS) programme.
URA said the Government will continue to monitor prices closely and release relevant price sensitive information in a timely manner.
