August 2026 produced 201 million-dollar HDB resale transactions, the highest monthly count on record. The reflex reading is that removing the 15-month wait-out period, effective 28 July, let cash-rich private property sellers back into the resale market and pushed prices up.
Half of that is right, but it explains the wrong variable. The count of million-dollar transactions in a given month is governed less by what buyers are willing to pay than by how many flats are capable of transacting at that level in the first place. That number is set years in advance, by the Minimum Occupation Period.
A million-dollar flat is a narrow product
Q2 2026 recorded 491 million-dollar sales out of 6,396 resale transactions, or 7.7% of the market. They cluster tightly: Toa Payoh (66), Queenstown (65), Bukit Merah (64), and by type four-room (212), five-room (183), executive (93). This is not a distribution with a long tail. It is a specific product: large floor area, near-full lease, mature or city-fringe location, current layout.
Supply of that product does not arrive continuously. It arrives in discrete cohorts, when BTO projects clear their five-year MOP. Roughly 13,480 flats reach MOP in 2026, against 6,973 in 2025. The candidate pool for a record roughly doubled, and it doubled for reasons decided around 2019, when those projects were launched.
Test it against the month's headline sale. Bedok South Horizon, a 940-unit project completed in 2023, cleared MOP in early 2026. In August, a 1,215 sq ft five-room on the 16th to 18th floor sold for S$1.45 million, or S$1,192 psf, with about 94 years of lease left and the Thomson-East Coast Line's Bedok South station due to open at end-2026. Every attribute that made it a record was fixed before any buyer saw it. What August supplied was the eligibility date.
What the policy actually changed
The wait-out rule, in place since September 2022, never stopped private owners from wanting large flats. It stopped them from bidding on the ones that happened to be available during their 15-month exclusion. Their share of million-dollar purchases fell from roughly a third in 2022 to about 12% by late 2024.
Removing the rule added no flats to the market. It restored a bidder to contests that were going to happen anyway. So the causal claim is narrower than the coverage suggests: the policy changed who wins a fixed, pre-scheduled set of auctions. It did not change how many auctions occur.
Enquiries for million-dollar flats reportedly jumped 154% in the week after the announcement, which is a demand signal. Demand signals cannot manufacture a freshly-MOP'd five-room in Queenstown.
Why the index disagrees
This is why the resale price index fell 0.3% in Q2, a second consecutive quarterly decline and the first back-to-back drop since 2019, while town records fell almost weekly.
The index averages the 92% of transactions that are not million-dollar flats. The record count measures the 8% that are, and that 8% is a supply cohort, not a price trend.
The spread inside a single block makes the point. Bukit Merah saw a flat of the same size and the same 88-year lease transact at S$1,099 psf in the same month as a record S$1,466 psf, a 33% gap under otherwise identical conditions. Meanwhile the median four-room moved from S$627,000 to S$629,000 year on year. Nothing in the aggregate is accelerating.
The forecast this implies
If the record count is primarily a function of MOP supply, it is forecastable, and it should fall when the pipeline thins even if sentiment does not shift at all.
The 2026 cohort is led by Punggol (3,222), Queenstown (2,405) and Tampines (2,133). Punggol's volume dilutes competition across a lot of similar stock. Queenstown's lands in one of the highest-priced towns in the country, where a few dozen units meet a much larger queue. The same national figure produces opposite local outcomes, which is why a national headline is close to useless for anyone transacting in one estate.
Three things follow for readers:
- Read the MOP calendar for your estate, not the monthly headline. A thick cohort in your target town means competition for sellers and breathing room for buyers. A thin one means the reverse, regardless of what the index does.
- Treat a record as a statement about one flat's attributes, not the estate's price level. The comparable that matters is the same block in the same month, not the number in the news.
- Expect the wait-out effect to be concentrated, not general. It will be sharpest in the narrow slice where large, near-full-lease flats appear, and close to invisible everywhere else.
One prediction worth writing down. When the MOP pipeline normalises after 2026, monthly million-dollar counts will fall, and that fall will be reported as a market correction. It will mostly be a calendar.
Sarah Chen
