Singapore's official property tools: what HDB, URA and CEA put online

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Kooky

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Anyone looking at a home in Singapore can reach a good deal of official information without paying for it and without going through a commercial portal. The Housing and Development Board (HDB) runs its own portal with a listing service for resale flats and publishes its resale price records as open files. The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) publishes private housing transactions and runs a map portal for planning information. The Council for Estate Agencies (CEA) keeps a public register of the people allowed to do the work.

The difficulty is knowing which tool answers which question. Each was built by a different body, at a different time, for a different purpose, and each has limits that its own pages state or leave unstated. This guide goes through them one by one, using only what the bodies themselves have published: two HDB letters to the estate agency industry of May 2024, HDB's price files on the government's open data portal, two URA pages (one published on 21 October 2020, one last updated on 17 June 2026), CEA's open transaction records and a CEA press release of 17 October 2012. It says what each tool is for, who can use it, what it costs where the source gives a cost, and where the published description stops.

Government open data portal, HDB and CEA collections, read on 10 October 2026; URA property data page, last updated 17 June 2026. The month count is computed from the coverage of the five files.

Three public bodies, three kinds of tool

The tools fall into three families, and it helps to keep them apart. The first is a marketplace: HDB's Resale Flat Listing service, where flats are advertised and, according to HDB, transactions are carried through. The second is evidence: price and transaction records that HDB and URA publish so that anyone can see what homes actually changed hands for. The third is verification: CEA's register, which answers the narrow question of whether a person or a business is allowed to act as a salesperson or an estate agent.

None of the three replaces the others. A listing shows an asking price, a transaction record shows a price that was agreed, and a register entry says nothing about any property at all. The table below sets out which body runs what, as the bodies describe it.

What sits on the HDB Flat Portal

The HDB Flat Portal is the place where HDB has gathered its services for people buying or selling a flat. In its letter of 12 May 2024 to the estate agency industry, HDB lists what the resale listings sit beside: information on new BTO flats, a one-stop loan listing service, customisable financial calculators, and information on a buyer's HFE letter. HFE stands for HDB Flat Eligibility, as the letter of 30 May 2024 spells out.

The loan listing service deserves a line of its own because it is not only an HDB product. The letter of 30 May 2024 says the service is offered by HDB and six participating financial institutions. The letters do not name the six, and they do not describe how offers are displayed or compared.

The same letter says that sellers, or the salespersons they appoint, can complete resale transactions on the portal. So the portal is not just a shop window. For a resale flat, the listing, the contact between the two sides and the transaction itself are all meant to happen in one place. How the transaction steps work is a separate subject from the tools themselves, and the two letters do not set them out.

The Resale Flat Listing service: a staged opening

HDB did not open the Resale Flat Listing service, which its letters shorten to RFL, to everyone on the same day. It opened the seller side first, let listings build up, then opened the buyer side.

The soft launch lasted 17 days, from 13 May to 30 May 2024. During it, according to the letter of 12 May, HDB sent email invitations progressively to eligible sellers, which it defines as sellers "with a valid Intent to Sell". No transactions took place in that period, and buyers and their salespersons could not yet see the listings. The reward for listing early was position: the letter says flats listed during the soft launch would be among the first shown when the service opened fully.

By the eve of the official launch the service had a stock to show. The letter of 30 May 2024 counts over 600 listings as at 29 May 2024. One small discrepancy sits in HDB's own pages: its news page on the launch carries a published date of 29 May 2024, while its summary says the service was officially launched "today, on 30 May 2024". The letter to the industry is dated 30 May 2024 and gives that day as the launch date.

HDB's stated aim, in the letter of 12 May, is a "transparent, reliable and trusted marketplace" for resale flat listings and transactions. The letter adds that the service was developed with public and industry stakeholders, and names real estate agencies and property portals among them.

On price, the letter of 12 May 2024 says the service is "free of charge for the time being". That wording is almost two and a half years old at the date of this guide, and neither letter says how long the free period would run or what a charge would look like. Whether the service remains free in 2026 is not something the documents read here settle.

Who can list a flat and who can view one

Access to the listing service depends on which side of the sale a person is on, and each side has its own key.

For a seller, the key is the Intent to Sell. Both HDB letters refer to sellers with a valid Intent to Sell: the soft launch was for them, and the letter of 30 May 2024 says other flat sellers or their appointed salespersons can also list their flats. A flat owner has two routes, according to the letter of 12 May: list and market the flat personally, or appoint a salesperson to do it. The letters do not explain how an Intent to Sell is registered or how long it stays valid.

For a buyer, the key is the HFE letter. The letter of 30 May 2024 says buyers or their appointed salespersons can browse and compare listings, and that buyers with a valid HFE letter can begin transactions, contact sellers or salespersons, and arrange viewing appointments. HDB also wrote that it would "progressively invite" buyers holding an HFE letter to access the listings, so access on the buyer side was phased as well.

For a salesperson, the key is an appointment. The letter of 30 May 2024 is explicit that salespersons must be appointed by a buyer or a seller before they can access the listing features. During the soft launch the mechanism was simple, as the letter of 12 May describes it: the invitation email went to the seller, the link to the platform was in that email, and the salesperson accepted the appointment and then created the listing. A salesperson without a client on the portal has nothing to do there.

The practical effect is that every participant is tied to a real intention. A listing comes from an owner who has declared an intent to sell, or from a salesperson that owner appointed. An enquiry that can lead to a viewing comes from a buyer who holds HDB's eligibility letter.

What the portal asks of salespersons

HDB's two letters are addressed to the estate agency industry, so they say more about the professional side than about anything else. Three points stand out.

First, the tool. Each salesperson gets a personalised dashboard on the HDB Flat Portal that gives an overview of each client and of the salesperson's role for that client, since the same person may act for a seller in one sale and a buyer in another. The letter of 12 May 2024 presents it as a way to manage client activities and to spend more time on services such as budgeting and advising clients on their next steps. On the selling side the salesperson markets the client's flat; on the buying side the salesperson searches for flats for the client.

Second, the limit on use. Both letters say estate agents and salespersons must use the portal and the listing features, including the listing and contact features, "for the sole purpose of their clients' sale or purchase of flat". The contact details of sellers and buyers on the portal are there for the transaction in hand, not for any other use.

Third, the consequence. HDB writes that it will take firm action against estate agents or salespersons who breach the portal's terms and conditions, and names two measures: banning them from the portal, and reporting them to CEA for investigation. The letter of 30 May 2024 also reminds salespersons to uphold the integrity and professionalism of the industry and to act responsibly and ethically.

To help, HDB published a user guide for salespersons, and the letter of 30 May points to frequently asked questions on the HDB Flat Portal.

HDB resale prices: five files and two ways of dating

A listing gives an asking price. For what flats have actually sold for, HDB publishes a collection called Resale Flat Prices on the government's open data portal. Its description promises detailed HDB resale price and transaction data from 1990. The collection holds five files, split by period.

Added together, the five files run without a gap from January 1990 to October 2026: 36 years and 10 months. Only the last file is live. On 10 October 2026 the portal showed it as updated 16 hours earlier, while the four older files were marked as last touched two years before. Anyone who wants the newest sales needs only the file that starts in January 2017; anyone building a long price history needs all five.

The split matters for a second reason, which the collection page states: the date attached to a sale does not mean the same thing across the files.

A worked example shows why this is worth knowing. Assume someone compares the number of sales in a town in February 2012 with the number in March 2012. The February count comes from the second file and counts approvals in that month. The March count comes from the third file and counts registrations in that month. The collection page does not say how far apart approval and registration fall for a given sale, so the size of the effect cannot be computed from it; what can be said is that the two months are not counted on the same basis, and a jump or a dip at that exact point may come from the change of method.

Two limits should be stated. The collection page read for this guide lists no field names, so it does not say which details each row carries, and it gives no update timetable beyond the "16 hours ago" marker. And its description speaks of data "from 1990 to 2025" while the newest file is shown as covering sales to October 2026: the description appears to be older than the data.

For people who work with data, the page offers a sample call to the portal's programming interface for the collection's metadata, and its footer points to the Open Data Licence.

URA's private home transaction data

Private housing is URA's territory. Its property data page for private residential properties, last updated on 17 June 2026, lists five kinds of data: private residential property transactions, private residential rental contracts, developers' sales information, private residential projects in the pipeline, and private residential time series statistics.

Each answers a different question. Transactions show what was paid. Rental contracts show what was agreed between landlords and tenants. Developers' sales information concerns homes sold by developers. The pipeline shows what is still to come. The time series follow the market across periods.

URA offers three ways in. The first is a map. The property data page says the map shows private residential property transactions and rental contracts in the last 60 months, which is five years. A reader opening it in October 2026 is therefore looking at a window that begins in late 2021, and a sale older than that will not appear there. The second is a search: the page says more detailed data on private residential properties and executive condominiums can be searched through URA's Property Market Information search. Executive condominiums are thus covered alongside private homes. The third is a subscription service, described below.

URA's page of 21 October 2020 lists the searches by name: Private Residential Property Transactions, Private Commercial Property Transactions with Caveats Lodged, and Rental Contracts of Private Residential Properties. It describes them as part of a full suite of free property market data.

The pages read for this guide do not say how often the transaction data is refreshed, where each record comes from, or which details each record shows. The word "caveats" appears in the name of the commercial search and is not explained on either page. Those are points to read on the search tools themselves before leaning on a figure.

One more pointer sits on the property data page: for property ownership information and survey plans, URA sends readers to the Singapore Land Authority. Who owns a property is not something URA's transaction data is presented as answering.

The subscription route is REALIS. URA's page of 21 October 2020 describes it as a subscription-based platform with detailed data on Singapore's property market, and lists the features added at that time: an upgraded interface, data charting and analytics, customisable dashboards and search tools, and frequently used data reports.

The line between the free tools and REALIS is therefore not the subject, since both deal with property market data, but the depth and the working tools around it. The free searches and the map show transactions and rental contracts. REALIS is presented as a place to chart, analyse and build dashboards. Neither page gives the subscription price or the plans; the property data page only links to the subscription.

URA SPACE: the planning map

URA SPACE is a different animal from the transaction searches. URA's page of 21 October 2020, which describes version 3.0, calls it an online map portal for updated planning and real estate information. Its questions are about land and what may be done with it.

That page describes three uses.

• Zoning. Under the popular map services, a user can find a site's current and past Master Plan zonings, and check the uses allowed for a shophouse.
• A site's history. Under "Explore Development Site", a user searches an address to see development charge rates and past planning decisions.
• Supply and trends. The private residential supply data shows the approved dwelling units in completed private residential projects, with past sales and rental trends.

The page also records a widening of what is free. Planning decisions are available free from 1990 onwards, where previously the free record began in 2000. That is ten more years of decisions open to anyone researching an older building.

For a buyer, a seller or a salesperson, the value of a planning map is context that no price record gives: what the land next door is zoned for, and what has been approved on a site before. The page does not give the portal's launch date or spell out its name, and it dates from 2020, so the feature list above is the list as URA described it then.

The same URA page mentions two neighbouring tools that owners and their advisers meet. The Landed Housing e-Advisor lets a homeowner pick a type of landed house, then the part to be altered (interior, exterior or roof), and see the guidelines that apply; URA says it does not cover strata landed housing, shophouses, condominiums or flats. The Gross Floor Area Handbook, in a revamped web version, covers bonus floor area incentive schemes, apportionment and re-computation, and is organised by building element or space with diagrams.

The CEA Public Register and its transaction records

The CEA Public Register answers one question: is this person, or this business, allowed to do estate agency work? CEA's press release of 17 October 2012 says the register was introduced in January 2011 as a consumer safeguard and that access is free.

The release sets out how to search. A salesperson can be found by name, by registration number or by mobile number. An estate agent can be found by name or by licence number. The register also shows disciplinary records, and the release said that awards given by CEA to estate agents or salespersons in the future would be reflected there too. If someone doing estate agency work is not listed, the release says the matter can be reported to CEA. The 2012 release announced that the same search had been put into CEA's first mobile app, free on iOS and Android devices.

Alongside the register, CEA publishes a set of open records on what salespersons have actually done. The collection, titled CEA Salespersons' Property Transaction Records (residential), sits on the government's open data portal. Its description says it covers HDB resale flat transactions, HDB rentals, private rentals and private sales closed by salespersons, from January 2017 to the present. The file was created on 26 July 2018 and is updated monthly, on the 16th. When read for this guide it had last been updated on 16 September 2026, 24 days earlier, and held about 1.4 million rows.

What the columns leave out is as telling as what they hold. There is no price column and no address column: the location stops at town, district and general location. The file shows that a salesperson closed a transaction of a given type, for a given side, in a given area, with a transaction date. It does not show what the property sold or let for.

A worked example gives a sense of scale. Assume the 1.4 million rows are spread over the 117 months from January 2017 to September 2026. That is about 12,000 rows a month on average. The figure is illustrative only: the page gives the row count as approximate and does not say whether one transaction produces one row or one row for each salesperson involved.

The collection is published under the Open Data Licence, which the page describes as free for personal or commercial use.

What the published pages leave open

Several points could not be settled from the pages read on 10 October 2026, and they are named here so that nothing above is taken further than its source.

• OneMap. No page describing the OneMap service could be read for this guide, so it is not described here.
• Listing rules on HDB's service. The two HDB letters do not say how a listing's asking price is checked, how long a listing stays up, or whether a flat can carry more than one listing. HDB's news page on the launch showed only its title and summary when read.
• The cost of listing in 2026. The only statement found is "free of charge for the time being", from May 2024.
• How URA's transaction data is built. Update frequency, the origin of each record and the fields shown are not on the two URA pages read.
• The fields in HDB's price files. The collection page lists the files and their periods, not their columns.
• The live CEA register. The description of the register above rests on CEA's 2012 press release. Whether the register's own pages display each salesperson's transaction records, or whether those live only in the open file, was not confirmed.

Each of these is a matter of reading the tool's own notes before using its output. The public bodies date their data and label their methods in different ways, and the label is part of the figure.

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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