How to Read an HDB Resale Transaction Record
What each field in an HDB resale record actually means, which ones are reliable, and the four caveats that trip up most buyers.
An HDB resale record is short: a month, a town, a flat type, a block, a street, a storey range, a floor area, a flat model, a lease commencement date and a price. Reading it well means knowing which of those fields are precise and which are buckets.
The fields that are exact
- Price — the transacted resale price, rounded to the dollar. This is the number both parties signed.
- Month — the month of registration (from March 2012 onward) or approval (before that). Not the month the option was signed.
- Block and street — the exact address, aggregated by our postal code lookup.
- Floor area — approximate, in square metres, including any recess area or space-adding items. Treat it as a guide, not a survey.
The fields that are buckets
Storey range arrives in bands such as "07 TO 09". A second-floor unit and a fourth-floor unit on the same stack can appear in the same band, and the price difference between them is often five figures. Never treat a storey band as a floor number.
Flat model is self-declared at the point of registration and has drifted over three decades. "Improved", "New Generation" and "Model A" describe construction eras, not condition. Two flats with the same model label can be in completely different states.
Remaining lease
Records before 2015 do not carry a remaining lease field at all. We derive it from the lease commencement year assuming a standard 99-year lease, which is accurate for almost every HDB flat but will be wrong for the small number of 90-year or 999-year leases. Where the dataset does supply a lease string, we use it verbatim.
Four caveats before you compare
- The dataset excludes resales between relatives and resales of part shares, which can price below market.
- Renovation value is invisible. A $60,000 renovation is either in the price or it is not, and the record will never tell you.
- Duplicate rows collapse. We key transactions on block, street, flat type, area and month, so two genuinely separate sales of identical units in the same month appear once, with a duplicate count.
- Registration lags the actual deal by roughly four to eight weeks, so the newest month is always incomplete.
Use the record to establish a range and a trend, then use a viewing to explain why a specific unit sits at the top or bottom of that range.