By Gary Lim · ERA Senior Division Director · CEA Reg. No. R009877B · Published 20 September 2026

Every en bloc story you read quotes one number: the reserve price. Owners vote on it, newspapers headline it, and neighbours argue about it over the lift lobby noticeboard. And for a leasehold site, that number can be a third short of what the buyer actually has to fund — because of a line called the en bloc lease top-up premium, which almost nobody outside the marketing agencies ever explains.

Here is the scale of it. People’s Park Centre went to tender at $1.48 billion. The reported lease upgrading premium on top is about $535.4 million. That is not a rounding item. That is 36% again on the headline, before a single pile goes in the ground.

I have been doing this for 17 years and closed over 500 transactions, and I still see owners set a reserve price by taking a valuation of their own flat, multiplying by the number of units, and adding a premium they feel they deserve. That is not how the number works. A reserve price is a residue — it is whatever is left over after a developer subtracts every cost of turning your ageing block into a saleable new one. Understand the subtractions and you understand why your en bloc keeps failing.

So in this piece I have worked four live Singapore collective sales component by component, and every line reconciles to the dollar against the psf rate the marketing agents published. 新加坡买房，就找对的团队 — and for an en bloc, find the team that can read the arithmetic.

What an en bloc lease top-up premium actually is

When a developer buys a leasehold collective sale site with, say, 48 years left on the lease, they are not buying 48 years of development. Nobody finances a new condominium against a 48-year tail. To build and sell 99-year apartments, the buyer has to go back to the State and pay to restore the lease to a fresh 99 years. That payment is the lease upgrading premium — the en bloc lease top-up premium in everyday language.

Two things about it matter enormously and are almost never said out loud.

First, it is a different instrument from the land betterment charge. The land betterment charge prices an uplift in intensity or use — building more floor area, or changing what the site is used for. The lease premium prices an uplift in tenure. A site can owe a large lease premium and zero land betterment charge at the same time, which is exactly the position People’s Park Centre is in. I wrote a full guide to the charge itself at Land Betterment Charge: The Tax That Decides En Blocs, and the distinction between the two is the single most common mix-up I see in en bloc coverage.

Second, it is assessed by the Chief Valuer, and the method is not published. The conventional basis is the Singapore Land Authority’s leasehold table — the one everyone in the industry calls Bala’s Table — which expresses leasehold value as a percentage of freehold value by remaining term. A 30-year remaining term is conventionally valued at 60% of freehold. The table dates from around 1948 and is generally understood to have been built on a discounted cash flow at roughly 3% over the lease period. I want to be straight with you: that description comes from industry commentary, not from a published SLA methodology. SLA’s own public lease policy page covers State lease renewal, not private-site lease upgrading. The amounts get reported; the method does not.

So when you read that a site sold at “$1,277 per square foot per plot ratio, inclusive of lease top-up premium”, that phrase is doing a lot of quiet work. It means the land rate the developer underwrites is very different from the reserve price the owners take home.

The reserve price is the residue, not the starting point

Here is the sum a developer actually runs, in the order they run it. Start with what the finished project can be sold for. Subtract everything it takes to get there. Whatever is left is the most they can pay for your block — and the reserve price has to sit at or below that number, or the tender fails.

Notice where the reserve price sits. It is one line among nine, and on a leasehold site it is competing directly with the lease premium for the same pool of money. Every dollar the State takes in premium is a dollar the owners cannot have. That is the whole game.

Read more on En Bloc Reserve Price.

If you want to sanity-check any of this against your own numbers — what your unit might fetch, what the stamp duty would be on a replacement home, what you could actually afford afterwards — run your own numbers with the free calculators at listings.sg/tools before you sign anything.

The seven live clusters, and what each one really costs

As I write this there are seven collective sale clusters in the market, and they are a beautifully varied set — freehold and leasehold, residential and commercial, over-built and under-built. Here is the board, with the closing dates.

Sources: JLL, ETC, Knight Frank, Huttons and Mount Everest Properties tender announcements as reported by EdgeProp, The Edge, Business Times and Stacked Homes, April to September 2026. Figures marked “our estimate” are reverse-engineered from published psf rates and are explained in the relevant sections below.

Look at the lease premium column. Two clusters carry a published one. One carries an estimate. Four carry none at all, because they are freehold. If you own in a leasehold block and you are comparing your reserve price to a freehold neighbour’s, you are comparing two numbers that mean different things.

People’s Park Centre: an en bloc lease top-up premium of 36% on a $1.48 billion ask

This is the clearest demonstration in Singapore right now that a reserve price is not the developer’s land cost, and I am going to work it out in full because the arithmetic is public and it lands exactly.

Now the check. ($1,480,000,000 + $535,400,000) ÷ 821,016 sq ft = $2,454.8 psf ppr. The reported figure is $2,455. It matches to the dollar, which tells us the published rate is built exactly this way.

Split it and the story jumps out:

• Land alone: $1,802.6 psf ppr
• Lease top-up premium: $652.1 psf ppr
• The premium is 36.2% on top of the land price

Put another way: of every dollar the developer commits before construction, the owners of People’s Park Centre receive about 73 cents and the State receives 27. The block is 701 strata units — 324 retail, 256 office, 120 residential, plus a multi-storey carpark — across a 13-storey and a 30-storey block, and consent reached 80.5% by share value and 84.6% by area in June 2026 after failed attempts in 2019 at $1.35 billion and in 2022 at $1.8 billion.

Pek Chuan Building: the cleanest proof in the market

If People’s Park Centre shows the scale, Pek Chuan shows the mechanism, because its marketing agent published the land rate both ways — with and without the lease premium. That almost never happens, and it is a gift.

The building is a four-storey commercial block at 116 Lavender Street on a 28,700 sq ft site at plot ratio 2.5, giving 71,750 sq ft of floor area. At its 2025 launch the guide was $80 million, and the reported rates were $1,364 psf ppr with the lease upgrade and $1,114 psf ppr for own use only. The reported lease upgrading premium was $17.9 million.

Check both:

• $80,000,000 ÷ 71,750 = $1,115.0 — reported $1,114 ✓
• ($80,000,000 + $17,900,000) ÷ 71,750 = $1,364.5 — reported $1,364 ✓

The entire $250 psf ppr gap between those two published numbers is the lease premium. Nothing else. That is as clean a demonstration as you will ever get of what tenure costs.

And there is a second lesson sitting in the relaunch. The cluster came back in September 2026 at $77 million — a 3.8% cut — quoted at $1,073 psf ppr, this time without the premium. Add the same $17.9 million back and the all-in rate is $1,322.6 psf ppr against 2025’s $1,364.5. So the owners cut their headline by 3.8%, but the number a developer actually underwrites moved by only about 3.1%, because the premium is fixed and does not shrink when the ask does.

That is the trap in every leasehold en bloc negotiation. Owners think they are making a concession of a certain size. On the buyer’s spreadsheet the concession is smaller, because a fixed State charge sits underneath it diluting every cut.

One unresolved point on this cluster, and I would rather flag it than paper over it: the tender reporting in both 2025 and 2026 gives the State lease as expiring in May 2081, about 56 years remaining. EdgeProp’s own project directory records 99 years from 2 May 1978, which would expire in 2077 — about 51 years. Those two only reconcile if the lease actually commenced in 1982. The directory entry is also inconsistent with the tender documents on site area and floor area for the same building, so I treat the marketing figure as the better one. But five years of lease is material to a top-up, and only a title search settles it.

Lakeside Towers: the owners’ price froze, the buyer’s did not

Lakeside Towers is the one I would put in front of any owner who thinks holding the reserve steady is a neutral act. It closes first of the seven, on 1 October.

The site is 153,237 sq ft on Yuan Ching Road with about 190 metres of unobstructed lakefront, two 20-storey blocks completed in 1981, 144 units, 99-year lease from 1975 — so under 48 years left. The Master Plan base plot ratio is 2.1 but the as-built ratio is about 2.36, and JLL quotes the land rate off the as-built figure: approximately $1,277 psf ppr, with lease top-up premium and no land betterment charge.

Work it backwards. Floor area at 2.36 is 153,237 × 2.36 = 361,639 sq ft. The reserve alone gives $350,000,000 ÷ 361,639 = $967.8 psf ppr. For the published rate to be $1,277, the numerator has to be about $461.8 million — implying a lease top-up premium of roughly $111.8 million, about 32% on top of the reserve price.

That figure is my arithmetic, not a reported number, and I want that clearly labelled. JLL has not published the premium.

Now the part that should concentrate every owner’s mind. This is the third attempt: $305 million in 2018, then $350 million in February 2023, relaunched at $350 million in June 2023 and quoted then at $1,244 psf ppr. Run the same reverse-engineering on the 2023 figure and the implied premium was about $99.9 million.

A source conflict to note: EdgeProp’s 5 August write-up compresses this to “$1,277 psf ppr, lease top-up premium and bonus GFA included, no land betterment charge payable,” which contradicts JLL’s own announcement — JLL gives $1,277 as the base figure with lease top-up and no charge, and a separate $1,225 as the bonus-inclusive rate which does include the charge. I have used JLL’s version because it is the marketing agent’s primary announcement. On the $1,225 figure the implied premium plus charge is $124.0m at a 7% bonus or $137.3m at 10%, so the charge is somewhere around $12m to $25m — I cannot narrow it further because JLL has not said which bonus percentage it used.

Lakeside Towers sits in the Jurong West planning area, which is also where CDL’s Lucerne Grand previewed on 18 September ahead of its 3 October launch. If you own in that part of Singapore, those two dates three days apart will tell you more about local land values than any forecast.

Gilstead Court: what a clean freehold site looks like

For contrast, here is a site where the reserve price is very nearly the whole story.

Gilstead Court is freehold, completed in 1978, 48 units on a 75,479 sq ft District 11 site at plot ratio 1.4. The ask is $198 million, and EdgeProp reports no land betterment charge is payable. Being freehold, there is no lease premium either.

• Base floor area: 75,479 × 1.4 = 105,671 sq ft. $198m ÷ 105,671 = $1,873.7 — reported $1,874 ✓
• With the 7% balcony bonus: 113,068 sq ft. $198m ÷ 113,068 = $1,751.2 — reported $1,751 ✓

Both reported rates reconcile exactly, which incidentally confirms the plot ratio of 1.4. This is the fourth attempt — 2008 failed on consent, 2013 at $150.2 million fell through after a court challenge, June 2018 at $168 million, and a January 2019 relaunch at $153 million drew no bids.

The jump from $153 million to $198 million is a 29.4% increase, and it is the largest upward move on the board. But be careful how you present the per-square-foot comparison, because I have seen it done wrong in print already. The 2019 figure of $1,448 psf ppr reconciles exactly to the base floor area of 105,671 sq ft. The 2026 figure of $1,751 is the bonus-inclusive rate. Quote those two side by side and you understate the increase. The like-for-like base comparison is $1,448 to $1,874.

Nil land betterment charge is not the reason the ask rose 29%. It is the reason the ask is supportable. On a freehold site with no premium and no charge, every dollar of the reserve is a dollar of genuine land value, so owners can push harder before a developer’s sum breaks.

City Plaza: the $388 million that never gets charged

City Plaza is the odd one out, and it teaches the other half of the lesson: sometimes the reserve price is higher because of a cost that never appears.

The site is 141,503 sq ft fronting Geylang Road and Tanjong Katong Road in District 14, about 300 metres from the Paya Lebar interchange, freehold, zoned Commercial at gross plot ratio 3.0 — roughly 424,509 sq ft of floor area. The guide is $970 million. No source has published a psf rate, so by our arithmetic that is about $2,285 psf ppr at plot ratio 3.0, or $2,136 if a 7% bonus is allowed.

The important sentence in the marketing is this: no additional buyer’s stamp duty is payable on the acquisition, because the site is commercial-zoned. Do that sum. 40% of $970 million is $388 million of ABSD avoided — of which $48.5 million would have been the portion that never comes back even on a perfectly executed project.

The buyer still pays buyer’s stamp duty at the non-residential scale, about $48.5 million on our arithmetic, and GST considerations apply. But the 5-year build-and-sell clock disappears too, and with it the risk of clawback with interest. That is a real financing and risk saving on top of the cash.

So City Plaza’s owners can ask a number that would be unsupportable on an identical residential site, because their buyer is carrying a fundamentally lighter tax load. It is the same principle as the lease premium, running in the opposite direction: the reserve price absorbs whatever the surrounding costs leave room for.

One caution I want to put on the record rather than gloss: URA has given Written Outline Advice supporting in principle a residential-led mixed-use redevelopment of the site. What happens to ABSD once that use change is acted on is not something I could verify at IRAS. So the honest statement is “no ABSD on the acquisition, as reported” — not “no ABSD, full stop.” Do not build a financial decision on the stronger version.

Land betterment charge: the baseline is everything

The land betterment charge replaced three older instruments — differential premium, development charge and the temporary development levy — on 1 August 2022, and it is now administered and collected by the Singapore Land Authority. It is charged on the increase in land value arising from a chargeable consent, computed either through a published table of rates or, if the taxable person elects it, by spot valuation. SLA’s own explainer characterises it as roughly 70% of the enhancement in land value, leaving landowners a 30% share of the uplift.

The rate table runs to 118 geographical sectors across use groups — A for commercial, B1 for landed residential, B2 for non-landed residential, C for hotel and hospital, D for industrial, E for places of worship and civic uses — expressed in dollars per square metre of floor area. Rates are revised twice a year, effective 1 March and 1 September. The revision effective 1 September 2026 raised non-landed residential rates by an average of 3.4%, with 70 of the 118 sectors moving up and individual sector changes running from about 1% to 29%.

Now here is the part that catches people out, and it explains three of the seven clusters at once.

Trendale Tower is the textbook case. Its floor area and development baseline are both 72,691 sq ft on a 21,709 sq ft site — an as-built plot ratio of about 3.35, well above the Master Plan’s 2.8, which would give only 60,785 sq ft. Trendale is an over-built 1980s block. It pays nothing up to its baseline. Gilstead Court and High Point are in the same position, which is why both carry reported nil charges to base.

For owners, the practical reading is blunt: if your block is over-built for its zoning, that is a genuine asset in an en bloc, and it is one of the few things that makes a small old site financially interesting to a developer. If your block is under-built, the redevelopment uplift is real but the State takes about 70% of it before your reserve price sees a cent.

Developer ABSD: 40%, and the clock that comes with it

A licensed housing developer buying residential land in Singapore pays 40% additional buyer’s stamp duty. It splits into a 5% portion that is never remitted and a 35% portion that is charged upfront and remitted only if the project is developed and sold within the deadlines. Miss them and the 35% is clawed back with interest.

The standard conditions for sites of five to 699 units are: commence development within two years, complete within five, and sell every unit within five. From 29 July 2026 the Ministry of Finance introduced two new categories for larger en bloc redevelopments:

Both new categories require the redeveloped yield to be at least 1.5 times the existing development’s unit count, and projects meeting complexity criteria get a further six months.

Why does this matter to a reserve price? Because a developer is not just pricing a tax — they are pricing the risk of the clawback. A five-year sell-everything deadline in a market where launches have been slow is a genuine hazard, and it gets priced into what they can pay you. The extended windows for large and mega sites are, in effect, the Government making big en bloc redevelopments financeable again. If your block is large enough to qualify, that rule change is worth real money to your reserve price. If it is a 48-unit boutique site, nothing changed.

These rates and conditions come from the Ministry of Finance’s 28 July 2026 release and a law-firm note on it. IRAS’s own remission pages were not reachable from where I did this research, so if you are about to act on a tax rate, confirm it with your conveyancing lawyer rather than with me.

Bonus GFA: the small line that explains the psf gaps

Singapore allows developers extra floor area above the Master Plan allowance for certain features — 7% for balconies, 7% for private enclosed spaces, 7% for private roof terraces, and 1% for indoor recreation space. The balcony allowance was cut from 10% to 7% with effect from January 2019.

URA’s own guidance says the additional balcony floor area may be subject to SLA levying a land betterment charge. And that is what reconciles two psf gaps that otherwise look like errors.

Take Trendale Tower. The 2022 round asked $168 million on the same 72,691 sq ft baseline and reported $2,257 psf ppr, alongside a separately reported development charge on the bonus floor area of about $7.6 million. Check it: ($168,000,000 + $7,600,000) ÷ 77,779 sq ft with the 7% bonus = $2,257.7. Exact match.

So the agent’s quoted rate is (reserve price + the charge on the bonus floor area) ÷ (baseline floor area + bonus). Apply that structure to the 2026 figure of $2,248 and the implied charge is about $6.85 million. I will be honest that this sits slightly awkwardly — charge rates have risen since 2022, so an implied figure below the 2022 number is a little odd, and the proposed serviced-apartment scheme may be changing the use group applied. I flag it rather than resolve it.

The same structure explains High Point. At 47,607 sq ft and a baseline plot ratio of 4.45 with a 7% bonus, $580 million divided by 226,681 sq ft gives $2,558.7 psf ppr — but the reported figure is about $2,641 to $2,645, implying roughly $18.7 to $19.6 million added. Spread over the 7% bonus of 14,830 sq ft, that is about $13,500 per square metre of bonus floor area, which sits squarely in the range of prime-district non-landed residential rates. ETC’s own wording is consistent: no charge is payable up to the baseline plot ratio of 4.45. The bonus sits above it.

I want to be careful here. That is the most consistent reading of the numbers, not a reported fact — High Point’s floor area in square feet is nowhere published, and I cannot exclude the agent simply using a different plot ratio in the denominator. But the cross-check supports it: Shun Tak’s December 2021 bid of $556.7 million was reported at $2,626 psf ppr, and $556.7m ÷ 211,851 sq ft — base plot ratio, no bonus, no charge — gives $2,627.8. The historic figure was quoted on a base, the current one on a bonus. Different bases, which is exactly why comparing headline psf rates across years misleads.

How owners actually set a reserve price

In practice the marketing agent runs the residual model I set out earlier — gross development value, less construction, lease premium, land betterment charge, stamp duties, finance, marketing and required margin — and arrives at what a developer could pay. The collective sale committee sets the reserve at or slightly above that, sense-checked against recent Government Land Sales results and other collective sales.

You can actually see this model peeking out in the marketing. When JLL writes “$1,277 psf ppr with lease top-up premium, no land betterment,” or Mount Everest writes “$1,364 with lease upgrade, $1,114 own use only,” that is the residual model made visible. Read those qualifiers carefully; they are the most informative words in any en bloc advertisement.

The second decision — and in my experience the one that actually breaks committees — is the method of apportionment: how the proceeds get divided. The law requires the collective sale agreement to state both the reserve price and the method. The common choices are:

The size of this decision surprises people. On a worked example of a 100-unit estate selling for $200 million, moving from share-value-only to a 50/50 blend shifts an individual owner’s proceeds by roughly 10% — on an unchanged reserve price. I have watched committees spend eight months arguing about the reserve and eight minutes on the apportionment, when the apportionment was worth more to most of them.

What the courts have said about hitting your reserve

There is a belief among owners that if the sale price meets the reserve, the committee has done its job and the sale is safe. That is not the law.

The leading authority is the Court of Appeal’s 2009 decision in the Horizon Towers case. It held that a sale committee owes fiduciary duties and functions in a trustee-like role; that it has a duty of conscientiousness including an obligation to obtain the best sale price; and that the statutory good-faith test requires the court to consider all the circumstances, not merely whether the reserve price was met. The committee there was criticised for holding to a reserve set months earlier while comparable sites had risen more than 25%, for knowing the premium had almost disappeared and not going back to owners, and for failing to obtain an independent valuation before the sale despite being authorised to.

The practical translation: a stale reserve price in a rising market is itself a breach risk. Hitting your number is not a safe harbour.

The 2013 Thomson View decision makes the mirror point. Objectors argued a $492 million valuation was too low and the $580 million reserve should have been revised up; the purchaser bid $590 million. The judge rejected the pricing case but did find one breach — the committee’s failure to extend the third public tender was a breach of their duty to obtain the best price, an MRT announcement having landed six days before close. The application was ultimately dismissed on an entirely different ground: secret incentive payments by the marketing agent to some owners.

And Thomson View was back before the Strata Titles Board in March 2025, which issued a stop order halting an $810 million sale after mediation failed. I could not establish the outcome of the scheduled High Court hearing, so I will not characterise it further.

All of this now sits on top of a changed statutory regime. Parliament passed the Land Titles (Strata) (Amendment) Bill on 8 September 2026, cutting the consent threshold to 70% for developments aged 40 to 59 years and 65% for those 60 and over, raising the requisition threshold to 35%, halving the signing window from 12 months to six, and extending the lockout after a failed attempt from two years to three. I covered the whole package in New En Bloc Rules Singapore.

The Bill does not touch reserve prices or valuation mechanics at all. But a six-month signing window and a three-year lockout both raise the cost of getting the reserve wrong, sharply. You now have half the time to collect signatures on a number, and three years in the wilderness if the market disagrees with it. As at today the commencement date has still not been announced — I have been checking the Gazette, the Ministry of Law press index and the statute page daily for nearly two weeks.

Who should push for an en bloc — and who should not

Frequently asked questions

What is an en bloc lease top-up premium?

It is a payment to the State to restore a leasehold site’s tenure to a fresh 99 years so the buyer can build and sell 99-year apartments. It is assessed by the Chief Valuer, paid by the developer on top of the reserve price, and it is a separate instrument from the land betterment charge — that one prices extra floor area or a change of use, while the lease premium prices tenure.

Do owners pay the lease top-up premium out of their proceeds?

No. Owners receive the reserve price; the developer funds the premium separately. But it affects owners indirectly and heavily, because every dollar of premium is a dollar the developer cannot put into the reserve price. On a leasehold site the two compete for the same pool of money.

How much can the premium be?

It scales with how much lease is missing. People’s Park Centre’s reported premium is about $535.4 million on a $1.48 billion ask — 36.2% on top of the land price. Pek Chuan Building’s reported premium is $17.9 million on an $80 million ask, or 22.4%. Our reverse-engineered figure for Lakeside Towers, which has under 48 years left, is about $111.8 million on $350 million — roughly 32%.

Does a freehold site pay a lease top-up premium?

No. Freehold sites pay none at all. That is a large part of why freehold collective sales can carry higher headline reserve prices per square foot than leasehold ones without the developer’s sum breaking — there is simply one fewer State charge in the stack.

Why do some en bloc sites pay no land betterment charge?

Because the charge is levied on uplift above the development baseline, and for an old estate the baseline is usually the as-built floor area. A block built in the 1970s or 80s to a plot ratio above what today’s Master Plan allows has no uplift to tax. Gilstead Court, High Point and Trendale Tower are all reported as paying nothing up to their baselines — though the bonus balcony floor area above the baseline can still be charged.

How much ABSD does a developer pay on a collective sale site?

40% on residential land: a 5% portion that is never remitted, and a 35% portion remitted only if the project is commenced, completed and fully sold within the deadlines. From 29 July 2026 sites of 700 to 1,399 units get six years and sites of 1,400+ get seven, with an interim test of 50% sold by year six. Commercial-zoned sites pay no ABSD on acquisition — worth about $388 million on a site like City Plaza.

Is hitting the reserve price enough to make an en bloc sale safe?

No. The Court of Appeal has held that the good-faith test requires a court to consider all the circumstances, not merely whether the reserve was met, and that a sale committee has a duty to obtain the best price. A reserve set long ago in a market that has since risen is itself a risk. Committees should revisit the number rather than treat it as a finish line.

What does the method of apportionment change?

How the proceeds are split between owners — by share value, by strata area, by valuation, or a hybrid. It is worth roughly 10% to an individual owner on an unchanged reserve price, which means it can matter more to you personally than a fight over the headline number. Settle it early and in writing; it is the most common reason committees stall.