Sales of S$5M+ homes climbed to a four-year high in H1 2026, even as the broader private residential market cooled. Here's what's behind the divergence — and why the CCR-RCR price gap is quietly reshaping who can afford to "upgrade" into prime districts.
Sales of luxury homes (S$5 million and above) climbed to a four-year high in H1 2026, bucking a slowdown in the broader private residential market. New citizens, permanent residents, and wealthy investors seeking safe-haven assets are driving the surge.
Sales of luxury homes climbed to a four-year high in the first half of 2026, bucking a slowdown in the broader private residential market. According to Realion (OrangeTee & ETC) Research, luxury home transactions in the Core Central Region (CCR) — landed and non-landed homes priced at S$5 million or more, excluding bulk deals involving more than one unit — reached 353 in H1 2026. That's up 24.7% from 283 transactions in the year-ago period, and 54.8% higher than the 228 units recorded in H1 2024.
The divergence is stark. While CCR luxury transactions surged, overall private home sales (excluding executive condominiums) declined 12% to 10,909 units in H1 2026, down from 12,328 units in H1 2025. Knight Frank Singapore's analysis of large prime non-landed homes (at least 2,500 sq ft, located in Districts 1, 2, 4, 9, 10 and 11 — the CBD, Orchard Road, Sentosa, Bukit Timah and Thomson) found 128 sales in H1 2026 with a combined value of S$1.1 billion. The average unit price rose 8.3% to S$2,689 psf, even though this was eight transactions fewer than in H2 2025.
Nicholas Keong, Knight Frank Singapore's head of residential and private office, said Singapore's safe-haven status has promoted certainty among those granted citizenship and permanent residency, with some upgrading from tenancies to home ownership. Agents are also reporting more enquiries from citizens and PRs based overseas seeking to acquire Singapore property to preserve capital, as market watchers point to wealthy investors treating prime Singapore assets as a hedge against global macroeconomic uncertainty.
One of the more consequential shifts sits in the pricing data itself: the median price gap between CCR and Rest of Central Region (RCR) homes shrank to just 10.1% in 2025 — nearly halving from 21.5% in 2024. As that gap narrows, the prime segment has essentially become, in the words of one industry executive, a more accessible upgrade option for Singaporean buyers who might previously have looked only at RCR.
| Segment | 2025 Median PSF | 2026 Median PSF (as at 29 Jun) |
|---|---|---|
| CCR | S$3,071 | S$3,184 |
| RCR | S$2,789 | S$2,643 |
Lee Sze Teck, Huttons Asia's senior director of data analytics, said this suggests the CCR market may be undergoing a structural shift, with local buyers increasingly filling the gap left by foreign purchasers — new CCR condo sales jumped nearly five-fold to 1,916 units in 2025, from just 378 units in 2024.
The scale of the foreign buyer retreat is significant. Foreigners accounted for a significant 17% of new home purchases between 2015 and 2022, according to Huttons research. That share dived to 10.7% in 2024, after the government raised Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty on foreign purchases to 60% in April 2023, and has fallen further to just 4.7% in 2026 to date.
Worth noting: in the ultra-luxury segment — condos priced at S$10 million and higher — sales jumped to a 15-quarter high in Q2 2026, according to Realion. Twenty-three units changed hands (excluding bulk deals), exceeding both the 16 units sold in Q1 2026 and the 14 units in Q2 2025. Six of these were new sales (two each at 21 Anderson and Skywaters Residences, one each at 32 Gilstead and Park Nova); the remaining 17 were resales.
The top prime non-landed deal of the first half was a 6,232 sq ft unit at The Marq on Paterson Hill, which changed hands for S$37 million — S$5,937 psf — in January, according to Knight Frank data. Other notable big-ticket deals included a unit at Seven Palms Sentosa Cove that sold for S$23.9 million, and a unit at Nassim Park Residences that fetched S$23 million.
Among new launches, District 9's River Modern chalked up the highest sales in the S$5 million-plus price range, with 44 units sold in H1. Other CCR projects with strong luxury take-up included The Draycott (11 units, S$5.4M-S$7.1M), Goodwood Residence (8 units, S$5.1M-S$8.8M), and Leedon Residence (9 units, S$5.9M-S$16.3M).
The CCR-RCR gap narrowing to 10.1% is the number I'd pay closest attention to here, even though it's buried under the headline luxury story. For years, the conventional upgrader logic was "RCR gives you 80% of the CCR lifestyle at a real discount" — that discount has now nearly halved. If you're weighing CCR vs RCR for your own upgrade, the math genuinely looks different than it did even two years ago, and it's worth running the actual numbers rather than defaulting to the old assumption.
One caution worth naming: a meaningful chunk of this luxury demand is citizenship/safe-haven driven, not typical owner-occupier demand — that kind of buyer tends to be less sensitive to interest rates and more sensitive to global uncertainty, which makes this segment behave differently from the broader market you and I usually discuss. Don't read the luxury segment's strength as a signal for where mass-market or OCR pricing is headed; the data here shows those markets are actually moving in different directions right now.
Source: The Business Times, 13 July 2026, "Flight to safety: New citizens and PRs drive Singapore luxury home sales as broader market cools" by Jeanne Mah. Data from Realion (OrangeTee & ETC) Research, Knight Frank Singapore, Huttons Asia, and URA. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.
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