With the current housing shortage, buyers are caught between a long wait for BTO flats or sky-high resale flat prices. On top of that, a recent rule tweak means that backing out at flat selection – if you don’t like what’s available, it relegates you to second-timer status.

So if you are caught in a bind on whether to opt for a resale HDB, one way that might help is to look at the price gaps between BTO and resale flats in different estates. This could help you decide whether it’s worth waiting for a new flat, or whether you should just go out and hunt in the resale market.

That said, we’d like to caveat this by saying that you should not just look at the numbers and follow them blindly. For some estates, there may be big variances due to the differing ages of the older HDB flats.

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