In District 23 there are terrace houses that changed hands, since 2015, at an average of $1,605 per square foot. On the same streets, in the same years, there are terrace houses that changed hands at an average of $284 per square foot. The cheap ones averaged $533,833 for a whole house.
They are not smaller. The expensive ones average 2,174 square feet, the cheap ones 1,921.
The difference is that one group is freehold and the other sits on a lease that started on 18 March 1947. That lease runs 99 years, so it ends in 2046, and a buyer signing this year gets twenty years.
A listing for either of them can correctly print the same three words: 99-year leasehold, or nothing at all about the lease start. The date that produces a five-and-a-half times price difference was in the public transaction record the entire time. It just was not on the page anyone was reading.
That is the pattern in all six checks below. Each one is a fact that is published, checkable, and routinely missing from the place you are looking.
The Words "99-Year Leasehold" Describe A House With 20 Years Left And One With 85
Ninety-nine years from 1947 leaves twenty. Ninety-nine years from 2011 leaves eighty-four. Both are 99-year leasehold. Only one of them is a mortgage a bank will write comfortably, and only one lets you use CPF the way you were assuming.
Here is District 23, terrace houses only, every sale from 2015 onward, grouped by the year the lease started: