URA caveats, explained

Buy a private property in Singapore and your lawyer will almost certainly lodge a caveat with the Singapore Land Authority. It is a legal notice that says: someone has agreed to buy this property, and their interest comes first. It stops the seller from quietly selling to someone else between option and completion.

The side effect is the useful part. Caveats state the agreed price, and they are public records. The Urban Redevelopment Authority collects them, adds the monthly sales returns that developers must file for new launches, and publishes the lot as its private residential transaction data. When an agent shows you “caveat data,” this is what they mean.

The sequence in a typical resale: buyer and seller agree on price, the seller grants an Option to Purchase, the buyer exercises it, and the buyer’s lawyer lodges the caveat. That last step usually happens a few weeks after the handshake.

So the lodgement month in the data is not the month the deal was struck. The most recent month always looks thin because many of its caveats have not been lodged yet. Any chart that treats the newest month as complete will read as a crash that never happened. Our condo pages handle this by anchoring comparisons on the last complete month.

Three dates get mixed up constantly. The option date is when the seller commits to sell. The caveat lodgement date is when the buyer’s claim is registered, and it is the date URA publishes. Completion is when money and keys change hands, typically 8 to 12 weeks later. A caveat can also be withdrawn if a deal falls through, which is why a transaction occasionally vanishes from the record.

A single caveat tells you what one buyer paid. It does not tell you whether that was a good price. The unit could be a ground floor lot facing the rubbish chute or a top floor unit with an unblocked view, and the caveat looks the same.

What works: compare the price per square foot against the project’s recent median, then check how many transactions that median is built on. Five sales in a year is a trend. One sale is an anecdote.

REALIS, URA’s subscription service, is built for agencies and priced accordingly. For most owners and buyers it is overkill. URA’s free data covers every caveat and developer sale from the trailing five years, and that is the data behind this site, refreshed daily. If you want history beyond five years for HDB flats, our HDB pages go back to 1990.

Landed transactions are in there too, though URA anonymises the addresses. We break them out by district.