Free Singapore Property Beginner's Guide: What Is Inside
A free 25-page PDF on Singapore property: homes, stamp duties, loans and the 10 steps to buying, with charts and worked sums. Get it with the newsletter.
Propwise now has a free, 25-page guide to Singapore property. It explains what you can buy, who is allowed to buy it, what it costs and how the loan works, with a chart, map or table on almost every page. You get it free when you join the Propwise newsletter.
It is a rebuilt edition of the Beginner’s Guide that first went out in 2011. Every rule and number is new, dated and traced to an official source: URA, HDB, MAS, IRAS, CPF Board and SingStat. The rules are as at 18 October 2026.
See the guide and get it free ›
What is in the guide
The guide has 10 chapters, plus a glossary of 28 property terms, eight mistakes to avoid and a one-page checklist to use before you make an offer.
- Know your homes: HDB flats, ECs, condos and landed homes, and what each costs.
- Tenure, title and who can buy: freehold or 99 years, income ceilings, and who may buy what.
- Where: the three private market segments on a map, the 28 districts, and every HDB town ranked.
- Who is who: the agencies, developers, agents and banks, and what each does.
- Prices, rents and the property cycle: 30 years of data and the wave of flats reaching their minimum occupation period.
- The rules: stamp duties, loan limits, CPF and HDB grants, each with a worked example.
- The 10 steps to buying: the route for a BTO, an HDB resale, a new launch and a private resale.
- Your mortgage: SORA, fixed or floating, and what a rate change does to the instalment.
- Owning and selling: yearly costs, MOP and Seller’s Stamp Duty, and en bloc.
- Renting out and investing: yield, vacancy, tax, and a rent-or-buy checklist.
A look inside
The market in six numbers
Page 3 starts with facts that change slowly. About 77% of resident households live in an HDB flat, and more than 9 in 10 own the home they live in (SingStat, 2025). The median private condo or apartment changed hands at S$2,021 a square foot in Q3 2026 (URA caveat data). Below the numbers is a 30-year chart of private and HDB prices, with each cooling measure marked and explained in Chapter 6.
Where you buy changes the result
URA splits private housing into the Core Central Region (CCR), the Rest of Central Region (RCR) and the Outside Central Region (OCR). The guide draws them on a map. It then shows that since Q1 2014 the OCR condo price index has risen 60% and the RCR index 51%, while the CCR index has risen 19% (URA, via SingStat Table Builder; rebased by Propwise).
Every HDB town, ranked
Another page ranks every HDB town on the median 4-room resale price and rent. In the 12 months to September 2026, a 4-room flat in Queenstown had a median price of S$1,028,000. In Jurong West it was S$535,000, so Queenstown cost 1.9 times as much (HDB resale transactions, via data.gov.sg).
Stamp duties, with the sums
The rules chapter shows each duty as a table and then works it through. On a S$2 million home, a citizen buying a first home pays about S$69,600 in Buyer’s Stamp Duty and no Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty. A foreigner pays about S$1.27 million in duties, because the ABSD rate is 60% (IRAS BSD and ABSD rates). The same page covers the Seller’s Stamp Duty schedule that applies to homes bought on or after 4 July 2025.
What a rate change does to your instalment
The mortgage chapter charts the 3-month SORA against the HDB loan rate and the CPF Ordinary Account rate since 2019. SORA stood at 1.24% on 14 October 2026, against an HDB loan rate of 2.6% (MAS and HDB). It then shows what a change in rate does: a S$900,000 loan over 30 years costs S$3,106 a month at 1.5% and S$4,297 a month at 4.0%, the stress rate that banks use for the TDSR test (MAS; Propwise calculation).
The 10 steps, with a timeline
Chapter 7 sets out the ten steps from “rent or buy?” to collecting the keys. It also gives the route for each type of purchase (BTO, HDB resale, new launch and private resale) and a timeline in weeks for a typical resale purchase.
Who the guide is for
- First-time HDB buyers, whether you plan a BTO or a resale flat. Start with chapters 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8.
- People looking at a new condo or an EC. Start with chapters 1, 3, 6, 7 and 8.
- Second-home buyers and investors. Start with chapters 5, 6, 9 and 10.
- Anyone who wants to understand the market before reading the news. Start with chapters 3, 4 and 5.
The guide is general information. It does not tell you what to buy, and rules change, so check the current position with the agency or a licensed adviser before you decide.
How to get it
Joining takes under a minute.
- Enter your email on the guide page or the newsletter page.
- We email you a link. Click it to confirm your address.
- The guide is yours to download on the confirmation page, and we send you a second email with the same link so you can find it again.
You will also get SG Property Daily, a short morning email with Singapore property news, new Propwise articles and the numbers behind them. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
