When we started seeing runaway prices after Covid, there was a sense of “not this again,” and most market watchers had flashbacks to 2009 to 2013, or the 2017 en-bloc fever. The last two times property prices skyrocketed, some of the more common scapegoats were:

• Developers being too exuberant, and
• Foreigners pushing up prices

So we saw the slew of responses, from new cooling measures to higher Land Betterment Charges (LBC). But as the post-covid phase came to a close, there was a sense that analysts and regulators were missing something. Foreigners had been hit with the highest ABSD rate ever, with taxes doubling to 60 per cent; and we saw prices dip in the most affected areas. But still, property prices remained high. Then the expected “second round” of en-bloc fever never materialised; and far from being exuberant, developers have been at their most muted and timid in decades....