Does being in an opposition-held ward affect your property prices? Find out here!

Property search website 99.co did the research on this hot topic and released their findings recently. This is extracted from their report.

PRIVATE HOUSING

The below graphs shows how the property prices in four wards – Aljunied, Ang Mo Kio, Potong Pasir and West Coast have changed over the last 10 years:

Some key historical events for your reference:

*PAP: People’s Action Party, WP: Workers' Party, SDA: Singapore Democratic Alliance

As you can clearly see from the graphs, both Aljunied and Potong Pasir have outperformed the Singapore Average in terms of the property price appreciation. In fact, both wards are amongst the best performing areas in Singapore, with its properties more than doubling on average over the last 10 years—a growth rate of over 100%.

What about PAP wards? We’ve looked at all the PAP wards, and chose Ang Mo Kio and West Coast GRC for illustration purpose. Essentially Ang Mo Kio has performed just as well as Aljunied, but West Coast has performed quite a bit below the national average and have only grown about 50% in the last 10 years.

“The rise or fall of property prices is not dependent on whether the property is in a PAP or an opposition ward. Rather, the property prices are a factor of the location and the corresponding supply and demand characteristics at the given point in time.” - Eugene Lim, Key Executive Officer of ERA

Perhaps more interestingly, the patterns and trend lines of the wards have remained in sync with the national average and other wards despite control of wards changing hands in major ways in 2011. So from this data, it seem to be logical conclusion that whether the ward is in PAP or in opposition hands, the property prices do not change significantly differently.

HDB HOUSING

Note: Graphs are created based on monthly transaction prices based on URA and HDB data, and is plotted to the best of our abilities, some degree of error may occur due to mapping of postcodes to GRCs and SMCs.

In general, HDB property prices are basically extremely boring to look and the overwhelming conclusion is simply: all wards are the same.

Over the last 10 years, HDB resale prices in almost all wards have appreciated between 80-100%.

With the exception of the bump in Tanjong Pagar GRC’s PSF due to the resale market for Pinnacle@Duxton having opened up in 2014 (not shown in graph for brevity), the graph lines for all of the wards have pretty much been exactly the same.

Our conclusion here would pretty much be that all HDBs pricing behave the same way regardless of wards. This also means that HDB is a pretty consistent and simple investment—you can buy HDB anywhere and they would pretty much perform very similarly with other parts of the nation, unlike private housing which could give you anywhere between 50% to 150% price appreciation.

Do opposition party GRC properties appreciate less in value?—Our conclusion is clear. 

Whether the constituency is under the care of opposition parties does not influence property prices.

So we hope this relieves you from worrying about property prices when voting in the upcoming election, and perhaps provide some confidence that the country and the respective constituencies continue to prosper (at least in term of property price appreciation) regardless of which party wins the control of the constituency.

If it is not influenced by who controls the constituency, then what why do some constituencies appreciate faster than others?

There are many reasons why properties appreciate in some area, some of which includes:

“The data from 99.co clearly indicates that there is no difference in the valuations of residences between neighbourhoods. This likely indicates that common areas such as pavements, drainages, landscaping, etc, are being managed to similar standards. Otherwise, over 2-3 years, the differences will show and valuations in badly managed districts would drop.” - Ku Swee Yong, CEO of Century 21 Singapore

99.co has also added a special feature for general election 2015 where the constituencies are mapped out the so users can see which constituency the property they are searching for is in. Even after the election, many property searchers may want to know which ministers are in charge of the constituency, which may affect many matters including who they would have to appeal to for government related matters.