Geylang a hot property among home buyers
Home buyers continued to exercise their preference for mature estates, with Geylang the most hotly contested location for the second time this year in the latest sale of new Housing Board homes.
With a few hours left before the exercise ended at midnight yesterday, at least 2,166 applicants have vied for 748 units in Eunos Court.
This is a subscription rate of 2.9 applicants per flat.
Altogether, the November sales exercise had 7,344 applicants vying for 4,829 Build-to-Order (BTO) units - a rate of 1.5 - as of 5pm yesterday.
ERA Realty's key executive officer Eugene Lim said application rates for this round have been moderate and within expectations.
The previous BTO exercise in August had a similar response of 1.7 applicants per flat. Four-room flats in Eunos Court were the most oversubscribed, by 3.4 times.
Said a PropNex Realty spokesman: "The new BTO flats at Geylang are attractive to new home buyers due to its close proximity to the Eunos MRT station and lack of supply of new flats in the area.
"Upgraders and second-timers are also choosing flats in the mature towns of Tampines and Geylang."
While sturdy, the reception to the latest Geylang property was more muted than in an earlier exercise.
In May's BTO sale, Dakota Breeze in Geylang drew more than 3,100 applicants for about 670 units.
That made it about five applicants eyeing each unit, the highest take-up rate for that round.
In the ongoing round, Punggol's Northshore Edge was the next most popular BTO project, with 823 applicants eyeing 388 four- and five-room units.
Northshore Edge will be built using a prefabricated prefinished volumetric construction (PPVC) method, a modular construction technology meant to reduce the number of on-site construction workers and potentially reduce building time.
This latest sales exercise was the first time a majority of around 80 per cent of flats launched will be built using this method. Another 3,401 units under the Sale of Balance Flats (SBF) were offered in the latest exercise.
The next BTO exercise will be next February, when the HDB will offer about 3,600 flats in Choa Chu Kang, Geylang, Tampines and Woodlands.
A concurrent Re-offer of Balance Flats, which are unsold flats from previous SBF exercises, will also be held.
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