Stanley Tan
Thomson Reserve opened for sale on 31 October and sold 1,143 units over the weekend, about 90% of the project, at an average of $2,900 psf. Psf means price per square foot, the standard way Singapore property prices are quoted. The unit count and take-up come from Stacked Homes, and the average price from the Straits Times. This matters even if you have no intention of buying there, because a launch weekend is one of the clearest public signs of what buyers are willing to commit real money to right now.
A weekend like this usually gets read as proof that the whole new-launch market is running hot. What the numbers actually show is narrower: every 3-bedroom and 4-bedroom unit went, and what is left is 123 two-bedders and two five-bedroom suites. At a launch that clears the largest units in two days, your borrowing capacity has to be settled before the doors open, not after.
People at a launch are not browsing. They are committing money on the opening weekend, so a near sell-out in two days is taken as a sign that buyers are confident, that prices at this level are being accepted, and that the next project will price from here.
This is one project. The reporting gives no comparison with other recent launches, no prior take-up rates and no psf trend. So the headline supports a strong read on Thomson Reserve. On its own, it does not support a read on the market.
However, which units sold matters more than the headline figure. All 3-bedroom and 4-bedroom units sold at launch. What remains is 123 two-bedroom units and two five-bedroom suites, priced from $1.635M (Stacked Homes, 1 Nov 2026). The Straits Times reported that the majority of buyers were Singaporeans, buying either to live in or as an investment.
Thomson Reserve, after the launch weekend. Private property, this project only. Captured on 1 November 2026 from Stacked Homes.
| Unit type | Status after launch weekend |
|---|---|
| 3-bedroom | Sold out |
| 4-bedroom | Sold out |
| 2-bedroom | 123 remaining |
| 5-bedroom suite | 2 remaining |
Two things stand out. First, the units that cleared were the larger ones. A bigger unit at the same psf is a bigger price and so a bigger loan, which means the buyers who moved fastest here were the ones committing to the largest sums. That is what the result tells you. It does not tell you that two-bedroom demand is weak, here or anywhere else. It does raise the question of why those are the ones left.
Second, what is left is almost entirely one unit type. If you are shopping at this project now, your choice is narrow.
On price, the published figures are the $2,900 psf launch-weekend average (Straits Times, 1 Nov 2026) and the $1.635M starting price for what remains. Individual two-bedroom prices were not published, and the $1.635M figure is not broken down by unit type in the report. Working a two-bedder price backwards from the weekend average will not get you there either, because an average across every size sold tells you nothing reliable about one line of units.
Nobody has published why the two-bedroom units are what remains, and we are not going to invent a reason. But one explanation can be tested with arithmetic: if you are buying a small unit to sell it on at a profit, the margin is thinner than most people picture.
Here is the sum, with the assumptions named. Say you buy at the $2,900 psf launch-weekend average and sell later at $3,200 psf. That resale figure is not published anywhere. It is a deliberately generous best case, picked to show what happens even when the price move goes your way.
$2,900 to $3,200 is a gain of $300 psf, or 10.3% on what you paid.
Now take the costs off. Apply that 10.3% to the $1.635M starting price of what is left at Thomson Reserve, and the sale is about $1.804M, a gross gain of roughly $169,000. Assume a selling agent's commission of 2% of the sale price, which is about $36,000. You are down to roughly $133,000.
And that is before the rest of the costs. Legal fees at both ends. The buyer's stamp duty you paid going in. Seller's stamp duty if you sell inside the holding period, so check what that period is before you count on a sale. And the interest you pay the bank, which is likely the largest of them, because it keeps accruing for every year you hold the unit.
So the best case on a 10% price move is about $133,000 on a $1.6M commitment before any of those, and the realistic case is a good deal less. If the plan is to flip, the numbers have to be run before you commit, not after. If the plan is to live in the place, this matters far less, which fits what the Straits Times reported about the launch: the majority of buyers were Singaporeans, buying to live in or as an investment.
That is one explanation, not the explanation. None of it is in the launch reporting.
Units at a launch are released and taken on the day, in the order buyers commit. Nobody has reported how the buyers at Thomson Reserve arranged their money, and we are not going to guess. What the format itself tells you is enough: no one at the counter waits while you work out how much a bank will lend you.
Your loan size is not set by the unit you fall in love with. It is set by three things: your income, the debts you are already repaying, and the loan-to-value limit, or LTV, which caps how much of the purchase price a bank will lend you, with the rest coming from cash and CPF.
There is also a cap on how much of your monthly income can go to debt repayments in total, the total debt servicing ratio, or TDSR. That is why a car loan or a personal loan can quietly shrink the home loan you qualify for.
Working all of that out after you have seen a unit you like is working it out too late. The real lesson from a 90% weekend is timing, not price: the window to arrange your money sits before the launch, not during it.
One question we are hearing a lot from buyers belongs in that same window: whether to take a package with an interest offset account. This is not in the launch reporting. It is what comes up in our own conversations. An offset account is a deposit account linked to your home loan, and the cash you leave sitting in it is set against your outstanding loan balance, so the bank charges you interest on a smaller amount. It comes up because buyers holding cash between booking and completion want that money doing something in the meantime. Whether it is worth it depends on how much cash you genuinely keep parked there, and not every package offers one. Either way, it is a question for the comparing stage, which sits before a launch weekend, not after it.
Started as a mortgage banker with OCBC. Prior to Cashew, Stanley was a mortgage advisor at Property Guru Finance.
Raising the BTO income ceiling to $16,000 widened the pool of eligible applicants for November's launch without adding more flats, so the ballot is expected to be more competitive than in past exercises. Applicants should expect a lower chance of securing a flat than the historical 85% to 90% success rate within two to three tries, consider resale as an alternative, and separately check their income against HDB's concessionary loan ceiling, which is distinct from the BTO eligibility ceiling and determines whether they get the fixed 2.6% HDB rate or a market-linked bank loan.
Sarah Chen·23 Oct 2026
A 15% drop in HDB leasing volume in September reflects fewer rental approvals, not lower rents, since the figure counts transactions rather than prices. Whether rents rise or fall depends on whether the drop was driven by fewer available flats or fewer tenants, which the volume data alone cannot reveal.
Sarah Chen·22 Oct 2026© 2026 Cashew. All rights reserved.
