Two collective sales closed within months of each other in 2026: Loyang Valley at S$880M (S$940 to S$950 psf ppr, to a SingHaiyi consortium) and Tan Boon Liat Building at S$950M. A revised ABSD timeline for developers landed in the same window. Together they tell you what developers want, and why buying an aging condo as an en bloc bet is still a gamble more often than not.
What the ABSD change does
Developers buying a collective sale site pay Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty (ABSD) of 35% on the land. That charge is remissible only if they build and sell every unit within a fixed period. The rule now gives developers of large projects six to seven years to complete and sell, up from 5.5 years (Stacked Homes, August 2026).
That extra 12 to 18 months matters more than it sounds. The old 5.5-year clock made larger sites genuinely risky: miss it, and the 35% claws back. Extending it lowers the penalty of a slow-selling launch, which widens the range of sites a developer will bid on. The remissible ABSD itself, though, still favours smaller land parcels, because fewer units means less inventory to shift before the clock runs out.
The five traits that closed deals
The 2026 sites that actually went through share a clear profile:
- Freehold or 999-year tenure. Developers avoid the cost and delay of a lease top-up. A 99-year site with decades gone is a much harder sell.
- Built 20 to 40 years ago. Old enough that maintenance is expensive and the land is used inefficiently, not so old that structural issues complicate redevelopment.
- A significant plot ratio gap versus the URA Master Plan maximum. This is the core of the deal. If a site is built to a plot ratio of 1.4 and the Master Plan allows 2.8, the developer can build far more saleable floor area than exists today. That headroom is what they pay a premium for.
- Within a 10-minute walk of an MRT station. Determines how quickly the new launch sells, which is exactly the timeline the ABSD clock measures.
- Under 200 units. With 35% ABSD in play, mega-sites carry too much inventory risk. Smaller sites are easier to redevelop and clear within the remission period.
Pine Grove in District 10 (reserve price around S$1.78B) and Serenity Park in Springleaf are the names that keep surfacing in market chatter. Treat that as chatter. Pine Grove's reserve alone tests the appetite the ABSD rules are designed to constrain.
How to screen a site yourself
The useful signal is not a Reddit thread naming candidates. It is the plot ratio gap, and you can check it.
Pull the site's existing plot ratio (gross floor area divided by land area, findable from the development's records) and compare it against the maximum in the URA Master Plan for that plot. Where the existing ratio sits well below the allowable maximum, there is unbuilt value a developer can capture. Where a site is already built close to its maximum, there is little reason for anyone to pay a redevelopment premium, and an en bloc is unlikely regardless of how old the building is.
Run that check against the other four traits. A freehold, sub-200-unit, MRT-adjacent site from the 1990s with a wide plot ratio gap is a plausible candidate. A 99-year site built near its maximum, far from a station, is not, no matter how much the owners want it to be.
What this means if you are buying
An en bloc payout is a possibility, not a plan. Collective sales require a supermajority of owners to agree (80% by share value and floor area for developments more than 10 years old), a willing developer, and a price that clears the reserve. Any one of those can fail, and many attempts do, repeatedly, over years.
If you are financing an older condo partly on that hope, weigh two things clearly. First, the mortgage is real and monthly; the en bloc is speculative and may never arrive. Second, aging condos carry rising maintenance costs and, for leasehold sites, a shrinking tenure that erodes both resale value and how much banks will lend against the property.
The honest position: buy an older condo because it works as a home or an income asset on its own numbers. If the en bloc odds happen to look decent on the five-trait test, treat that as upside you did not pay full price for, not the reason you signed.
Sarah Chen
