The PropKaki Gap™

Definition

The PropKaki Gap is the percentage by which the median transacted price per square foot (PSF) of freehold private condominiums exceeds that of 99-year leasehold private condominiums in the same quarter, island-wide:

A reading of +20% means freehold buyers paid 20% more per square foot than leasehold buyers in the same quarter, on a whole-island median basis.

Scope and data source

Property types included: URA caveat records with propertyType equal to "Apartment" or "Condominium" only. Executive Condominiums are excluded (they are a quasi-public housing type subject to HDB resale restrictions and their freehold status does not apply). All landed property (Terrace, Semi-detached, Detached) is excluded: landed stock is overwhelmingly freehold and its inclusion would conflate tenure with property-type effects.

Tenure classification: A transaction is classified as freehold if its URA tenure field starts with "Freehold" or contains "999" (covering both "Freehold" and "999-year leasehold from..." titles). All remaining transactions are classified as 99-year leasehold. This mirrors URA's own published category system.

Transaction window: URA's rolling ~5-year private residential transaction data, accessed via the in-memory cache maintained by PropKaki's geo intelligence module. The same source powers PropKaki's District Price Tracker and the PIE property valuation tool. No direct URA API calls are made during the weekly computation — only the cached data is used.

PSF basis: Strata floor area in square feet (URA area field converted from square metres at 10.7639 sqft/sqm).

Computation steps

Suppression rules

A quarter is suppressed from all three series (freehold PSF, leasehold PSF, and Gap) if either tenure bucket contains fewer than 10 transactions in that quarter. This threshold matches PropKaki's district PSF suppression rule. Suppressing the entire quarter when either bucket is thin prevents a sparse freehold market in a given quarter from producing a gap reading that could be driven by a handful of high-value outliers rather than market conditions.

History accretes across weekly sync runs: once a quarter's values are written to market_series, they remain even after they fall outside URA's rolling 5-year window.

Interpretation notes

The Gap is an island-wide median comparison. It does not control for location, floor level, unit size, age, or project quality. A freehold condo in Bishan is compared to a leasehold condo in Tanjong Pagar in the same quarter. In periods where freehold and leasehold condo supply is geographically uneven — for example, if most new freehold completions are in the CCR while leasehold completions are in the OCR — the Gap may reflect the CCR/OCR price differential as much as the tenure premium.

PropKaki publishes the Gap as an observed market reading, not as investment advice. The tenure premium in a specific project or district can differ materially from the island-wide figure. For project-level tenure comparisons, use the PIE valuation tool with the tenure_split=true parameter.

Series keys and API access

All three series are available via PropKaki's free JSON API (no key required):

gap_premium_qtr returns percentage values (e.g. 18.5 = 18.5%).median_psf_freehold_qtr and median_psf_leasehold_qtrreturn SGD per square foot.

Citation

Preferred citation for the PropKaki Gap:

When quoting a specific quarter's reading, include the quarter, e.g.: "The PropKaki Gap stood at 18.5% in 2026Q1 (PropKaki Intelligence, methodology v1.0)."

Full citation formats, BibTeX, and licence terms: /market/cite.

Version history