A two-bedroom, 1,100 sq ft leasehold condo in Serangoon went up for sale in early February at $1.92 million. Two months passed without a buyer, so the owner agreed to shave $100,000 off the asking price. An offer finally came in May — then collapsed, because the would-be buyer was struggling to sell his own home first. Four months after it was first listed, the unit is still on the market.
It is a small story that captures a broad shift: resale condos are taking noticeably longer to sell, not because buyers have disappeared, but because they no longer feel any urgency — and sellers are refusing to blink on price.
Listings are staying online roughly twice as long
Data from property portals PropertyGuru and 99.co tells the story plainly. Resale condo listings are sitting online for close to twice as long as they did during the post-Covid-19 market peak.
On PropertyGuru, completed resale condo listings were taken off the portal after a median of just 45 days in 2022, dropping to 39 days in 2023 at the height of the frenzy. Fast forward to today: as at 18 May 2026, active resale listings created in the first three months of the year had a median age of 81 days. Four in 10 listings in every region had been live for more than 90 days.
| Active resale listings (PropertyGuru) | Overall | CCR | RCR | OCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active listings | 21,614 | 5,673 | 7,914 | 7,964 |
| Live > 60 days (%) | 79.6 | 80.9 | 79.5 | 78.7 |
| Live > 90 days (%) | 41.5 | 42.4 | 42.3 | 40.0 |
| Median age (days) | 81 | 82 | 81 | 81 |
The picture on 99.co is even starker. Resale condo listings taken off that portal in the first quarter of 2026 had been up for a median of 106 days — up from 66 days in the same period a year earlier. The Core Central Region (CCR) saw the sharpest jump.
| Median days listings stayed online (99.co) | Overall | CCR | RCR | OCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2025 | 66 | 76 | 69 | 60 |
| Q1 2026 | 106 | 145 | 116 | 86 |
The market has tilted toward buyers — everywhere
PropertyGuru Singapore managing director Yao Lu summed it up neatly: the resale condo market has clearly moved on from the urgency seen at its peak. With listings staying up longer, buyers simply have more options and more time to decide, and conditions have swung in their favour. Notably, the trend has been consistent across all three regions — CCR, the Rest of Central Region (RCR) and the Outside Central Region (OCR) — rather than being confined to one pricey pocket.
One buyer’s experience shows how this plays out on the ground. A 40-year-old sales manager said he had viewed more than 30 resale units over the past year without closing a deal. Many were priced well above market rate, he said, and where the location was good, sellers left no room to negotiate. Some also wanted to stay on in the home after completion, while he himself needed to sell his flat first — the kind of overlapping conditions that make a chain almost impossible to close.
Why sellers won’t budge
Sellers, for their part, have reasons to hold out. Wong Shanting, director and head of research at Newmark Singapore, pointed to rising land costs: with the cost of replacing a home expected to climb further over the next 12 to 18 months, owners see little reason to accept a lower price today. Add the friction of sellers asking to stay on post-completion, and deals that look workable on paper quietly fall apart.
But demand hasn’t actually cracked
Here is the twist: slower does not mean weaker. PropNex chief executive Kelvin Fong noted that the median resale price was $1,770 per sq ft as at 19 May 2026, up from $1,747 psf in 2025 — prices are still inching up, not falling. And the gap with new launches remains wide: the median for new condo sales sits about 44.3% higher at $2,554 psf, which keeps resale units looking like relative value.
Volumes back this up. Some 3,225 units were resold in the first three months of 2026 — broadly in line with the 10-year quarterly average of 3,216 units between 2016 and 2025. In other words, transactions are happening at a normal clip; they are just taking longer to get there.
The wider backdrop
Christine Sun, chief researcher and strategist at Realion (OrangeTee & ETC) Group, noted that the slowdown in transaction volumes is visible across other segments too — HDB resale, rental and industrial. She tied the broader caution to macroeconomic uncertainty, including geopolitical conflict, layoffs in some sectors and inflation worries from higher oil prices.
Even so, Sun expects the resale market to stay resilient: the supply of newly completed units is low, and the price gap between new and resale condos remains substantial. Recent tweaks to executive condominium rules — a higher allocation to first-time buyers and a longer minimum occupation period — could also nudge more HDB upgraders toward the resale market.
What it means if you’re buying
Patience is finally being rewarded. More listings sitting around for longer means more room to inspect units, compare options and negotiate — especially outside the prime districts. But with prices still firm and demand intact, this is not a fire sale. The realistic win is a fair price on the right unit, and the buyers in the strongest position are those anchoring to recent transacted prices rather than optimistic asking prices.
What it means if you’re selling
A good address alone no longer guarantees a quick sale. The strongest interest in any listing tends to come in the first couple of weeks, so pricing realistically from day one matters more than chasing the market down with a string of small cuts later. Sellers who genuinely need to move should price to sell; those who can afford to wait are choosing to — which is precisely why prices are holding even as deals slow.
What’s next
As long as new launches keep competing for attention and completed supply stays modest, the standoff is likely to persist: listings live longer, prices hold, and patient buyers keep the upper hand on choice. The question for the rest of 2026 is whether more sellers eventually meet the market — or simply wait it out.