Two five-room HDB records were set in September 2026. A unit at 1B Cantonment Road, The Pinnacle@Duxton, sold for S$1,701,000, or S$1,477 psf. A unit at 445A Clementi Avenue 3 sold for S$1,590,000, or S$1,307 psf, on 9 September.
The Duxton print got the coverage, but it is the less informative of the two.
Pinnacle is a closed category. All five of the highest five-room prices ever recorded in the Central Area came from that one development. The next-best comparable in the same planning area, on Rowell Road, sold for S$1.15 million in August. A half-million-dollar gap between one building and everything around it is a landmark premium, not a market signal.
Clementi Crest is an ordinary building. A May 2015 BTO, 385 units, 40 storeys, five to six minutes' walk from Clementi MRT. Buyers paid S$576,000 to S$725,000 for a five-room before grants.
Keys went out in 2020, MOP expired mid-2025, and a five-room cleared S$1.59 million fourteen months later. No architectural fame, no city view, no prime address, no interchange. Clementi is EW23, a single line, until the Cross Island Line arrives around 2032.
That is exactly the point. Clementi Crest has no special attribute to explain the price away with.
What the 2026 record set actually shares
| Project | Town | Price (S$) | Psf (S$) | Lease from | Remaining | Date |
|---|
| City Vue @ Henderson | Bukit Merah | 1,728,000 | 1,421 | 2019 | 92 yrs 1 mth | Apr 2026 |
| Pinnacle@Duxton | Central Area | 1,701,000 | 1,477 | 2009 | ~83 yrs | Sep 2026 |
| SkyTerrace @ Dawson | Queenstown | 1,700,000 | 1,295 | ~2015 | ~89 yrs | Feb 2026 |
| Clementi Crest | Clementi | 1,590,000 | 1,307 | 2020 | ~94 yrs | Sep 2026 |
Three of the top four are BTO projects from the 2015 to 2020 lease cohort that recently cleared MOP. Pinnacle has the shortest lease on the list at roughly 83 years, and is the only landmark on it. It is the outlier, not the archetype.
Note what the Clementi flat did not need. At S$1,307 psf it is near the cheapest per square foot in the table. It reached S$1.59 million on size and lease length, not on a premium rate. That is a far more repeatable route to seven figures than being the most famous HDB block in Singapore.
The mechanism is the MOP calendar
Roughly 13,480 flats reached MOP in 2026, about 93% more than the year before. The eligible pool did not grow, it nearly doubled. Around 15% of Q1 2026 million-dollar transactions were units with 94 or more years remaining that had just cleared the five-year mark.
Buyers are paying for a near-new flat without the three to five year BTO wait. HDB manufactures that product on a schedule. Every year a fresh cohort of tall, well-sited BTOs becomes legally sellable and reprices from subsidised cost to open market.
The spread is measurable. Non-mature towns recorded 24 million-dollar resales in August, a second consecutive monthly record. Year to date they have produced 134, already within five of the 139 recorded across all of 2025.
The uncomfortable part
None of this is happening in a rising market. The HDB Resale Price Index fell 0.1% in Q1 2026 and a further 0.3% in Q2, ending at 202.7. Over the same stretch, million-dollar sales hit a record 201 in August, 8.0% of all resale volume, with 1,290 year to date against 1,593 for the whole of 2025.
The index is flat to negative while the top of the distribution sets records. That is not a market rising. It is a market pulling apart, and lease length is doing more of the separating than address is.
One caveat. The 15-month wait-out period for private property owners was removed on 28 July 2026, and August was the first full month after. A single month cannot separate that effect from the underlying trend.
The next Pinnacle print will be reported as a record and will mean very little, because it measures one building against itself. The number that carries information is the first million-dollar flat in a town that has never had one.
Sarah Chen
