Singapore's Canberra Drive EC site draws 13 bids and a record land price

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The state tender for an executive condominium site at Canberra Drive, in Sembawang, closed on 1 October 2026 with 13 bids, EdgeProp Singapore reported the same day. The highest, S$163.9 million from a four-party consortium, works out at about S$825 per square foot per plot ratio, which EdgeProp reports as a record for executive condominium land.

Two things make the result worth a close look a week later. The first is the turnout: 13 bidders is the most for an EC site in eight years, according to EdgeProp, when analysts had been expecting between three and five or six. The second is the timing. This is a site sold under the tighter EC rules announced on 8 May 2026, which lengthen the time buyers must hold their homes and reserve far more of each project for first-time buyers. A thin field was expected. On this plot, at least, it did not turn out that way.

EdgeProp Singapore and The Straits Times, reports of 1 October 2026 on the Canberra Drive tender.

What was on offer at Canberra Drive

The plot is a 99-year leasehold site of 11,535 square metres, or 124,167 square feet, according to EdgeProp. It allows a gross floor area of 18,457 square metres and is expected to yield about 185 homes. The tender was launched on 26 May 2026, so developers had a little over four months to study it.

By the standards of recent EC land it is a small site. The last EC plot sold in Sembawang, at Sembawang Road, was sized for about 265 units, and the next one due in the north, at Admiralty Walk, is planned for about 450. The site is about five minutes' walk from Canberra MRT station, EdgeProp notes.

The land rate that everyone quotes, the "psf ppr", is the bid divided by the floor area the developer is allowed to build, not by the area of the ground itself. That is why a S$163.9 million bid on a plot of 124,167 square feet comes out at S$825 and not at more than S$1,300: the price is spread over the 18,457 square metres of permitted floor area. It is the figure developers use to compare sites of different sizes and densities, and it is the figure in which the record is expressed.

The 13 bids, from top to bottom

The top bid came from a consortium of Santarli Realty, Heeton Holdings, Kay Lim Holdings and Sunray Group Holdings. The top bid was 2.74 per cent above the second, EdgeProp reported, which matches the gap between the two land rates.

Second place went to Intrepid Investments, a Hong Leong company, bidding with TID Residential at S$159.43 million, or S$803 psf ppr. Third was a group made up of Apex Asia, BHCC Development and HSB Developments at S$158.6 million, or S$798 psf ppr. The gap between first and second was S$4.47 million; between second and third it was S$0.83 million. Three separate groups, in other words, arrived at a price within S$27 psf ppr of one another, and all three were above the previous record of S$794.

Below them the field thins out steadily. According to the full list published by the property portal Stacked Homes on 2 October, the next bids came in at S$770, S$735 from an entity linked to City Developments, S$710 from Kheng Leong, S$680 from EL Development, S$657, S$651, S$640, S$626 and S$623 psf ppr. Several of these were joint bids by three or more companies.

Then comes a long drop. The lowest bid, from Sim Lian Group, was S$71.72 million, or S$361 psf ppr. EdgeProp puts the spread between the highest and the lowest bid at 128.5 per cent. Sim Lian is no stranger to EC land: it set the previous record itself, at Woodlands Drive 17, less than nine months earlier.

Mark Yip, chief executive of Huttons Asia, told EdgeProp that the wide range of bids partly reflects uncertainty about how the policy changes will affect demand for executive condominiums. Developers were pricing the same plot, with the same rules, and reached very different conclusions.

How the record compares with earlier EC land

The previous high for EC land was S$794 psf ppr, bid by Sim Lian for a site at Woodlands Drive 17 in a tender that closed on 13 January 2026. The Canberra Drive top bid is about 3.9 per cent higher, by EdgeProp's calculation.

The local comparison is sharper. The Sembawang Road site drew four bids and was awarded in September 2025 to Oriental Pacific Development for S$197.8 million, or S$692 psf ppr. The new top bid is about 19.2 per cent above that land rate, EdgeProp reports, for a site in the same part of the island sold roughly a year later.

It also overshot the forecasts. The Straits Times reported that analysts had expected the top bid to land between S$630 and S$750 psf ppr. The top bid is S$75 above the top of that range, and ten of the 13 bids were inside or above it.

The Miltonia Close site, where Stacked Homes records a top bid of S$340.9 million from Hoi Hup, shows how different a larger plot can look: a far bigger cheque, a lower land rate and only three bidders.

For turnout, the reference points are older. EdgeProp recalls that the Sumang Walk tender in 2018 drew 17 bids and that Anchorvale Lane drew 16 in 2016. Sumang Walk went to a City Developments and TID partnership for S$509.37 million and became the 820-unit Piermont Grand, launched in July 2019 at about S$1,080 per square foot. Nothing since then had matched this month's count.

The new EC rules developers were pricing in

Executive condominiums are sold by private developers on state land, with conditions on who may buy and how long they must stay. Those conditions changed on 8 May 2026 for every site whose tender closes on or after that date, and Canberra Drive falls under them. A further change to the income ceiling followed in August.

Most of the table narrows the pool of buyers or asks more of them. A ten-year minimum occupation period doubles the time an owner must live in the home before selling it. The longer priority period matters most to a developer's sales plan: Mohan Sandrasegeran, head of research and data analytics at SRI, told EdgeProp that second-timer households would generally make up only 10 per cent of the initial allocation during those two years. Buyers who are not first-timers will now wait much longer for most of the units.

The last row pulls the other way. Raising the income ceiling from S$16,000 to S$18,000 brings more first-time households within reach of an EC, and both changes apply to the Canberra Drive site because its tender closed after 24 August.

Why a small plot drew a crowd

None of the reports gives a single reason for the turnout, but the figures they publish suggest some. A project of about 185 homes is a modest commitment: the top bid is less than half the S$340.9 million offered for Miltonia Close, and fewer units have to be sold to a buyer pool that is now nine-tenths first-timers for the first two years. The bid list is varied too, with single companies bidding against consortia of three, four and five partners.

Recent sales give those bidders some comfort. Stacked Homes reports that Coastal Cabana, a 748-unit EC, sold about 66 per cent of its units on launch day at an average of S$1,734 per square foot, and that the 572-unit Rivelle Tampines sold 92.5 per cent at S$1,893. Nicholas Mak, chief research officer at Mogul.sg, told the portal that the median price of new ECs was S$1,849 per square foot in the third quarter of 2026.

The neighbourhood is also a known quantity. Canberra Drive is the sixth EC site in the Canberra area, EdgeProp notes. Earlier projects there include The Brownstone, with 638 units, launched in July 2015; The Visionaire, with 632, in April 2016; Parc Canberra, with 496, in February 2020; and Provence Residence, with 413, in May 2021. The first of those launches is now more than a decade old.

The result was not read as a signal for every site. Eugene Lim, key executive officer of ERA Singapore, put it this way in the EdgeProp report: "The strong turnout this time does not mean caution has been thrown to the wind for future EC tenders."

What the land price means for buyers

A record land rate feeds through to launch prices, and the estimates published so far sit close together. PropNex projects an average selling price of about S$1,900 per square foot for the future project, EdgeProp reported. Mr Mak, speaking to Stacked Homes, expects between S$1,850 and S$1,920 per square foot at launch.

Set against the S$1,849 median he cites for the third quarter, those estimates put a Canberra Drive EC at or slightly above what new ECs are fetching today, on land that cost about 19.2 per cent more per square foot of floor area than the last Sembawang site. These are projections from a property agency and an analyst, not prices: no launch date or price list exists, and what the homes finally sell for will depend on the market when they come to sale.

For the households concerned, the rules matter as much as the price. Anyone buying here will be buying under the ten-year minimum occupation period and without the Deferred Payment Scheme, and nine in ten units will be offered first to first-time buyers.

The next tenders to watch

The northern part of the island has more EC land coming. EdgeProp counts a pipeline of about 1,860 EC units in the north, and the next site to be tested is Admiralty Walk, sized for about 450 homes, whose tender closes on 17 December 2026.

That is a different proposition from Canberra Drive: well over twice the number of units, sold under the same occupation and allocation rules. Wong Siew Ying, head of research and content at PropNex, told EdgeProp that Admiralty Walk will give a second reading of how the market values EC land under the new measures. PropertyGuru reported on 20 September that the tender for an EC site at Jurong East Avenue 1, sized for about 735 units, is also expected in December 2026.

Between them, those two tenders will show whether 13 bidders and S$825 psf ppr describe the market for EC land after the May rules, or one small, well-placed plot a short walk from an MRT station.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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