BE A REALIST: Uncover The Truth in Singapore Private

Property Market
Fu Yi, Orkhan Hasanli, Tan Yong Ying Joanne

Abstract— The Singapore government closely observes the property market and occassionally implements new policies as cooling
measures to prevent the market from heating up too quickly. Even though several government and non-government organizations
already created visualization tools to explain the property market in Singapore, they are unable to reveal more information from the
property market which has a complicated nature. Thus, there is still much potential in using new tools to advance the understanding
and visualizations of changes in the market.
Through the integration of R packages, our application will help users to discover patterns and compare differences between
property prices in different administrative areas over time. Firstly, we used plotly to chart the comparison between total units sold
and SIBOR (Singapore Interbank Offered Rate) which serves as a main factor of fluctuation in number of units sold. Secondly, by
creating the geofacet map for Singapore, we visualised changes in median unit price over time from the perspective of planning
areas and postal districts. Thirdly, by coordinating the views between two visualizations, we used a treemap as a user interface to
update the ridgelines plot which zooms into the distribution of prices in a specific region by property type and type of sale. Lastly, we
used the Local Indicators for Spatial Autocorrelation (LISA) analysis to reveal clusters of properties in Singapore by their median
unit price, and incorporated the results into an interactive map using the tmap package. For the ridgelines plot and LISA analysis
mentioned above, all the private property types such as apartment, condominium, executive condominium, detached house, semi-
detached house, terrace house as well as different type of sales such as new sale, resale and sub-sale were provided for users to
drill down into.
Index Terms— SIBOR (Singapore Interbank Offered Rate), Geofacet, Ridgelines, Local Indicators for Spatial Autocorrelation
(LISA), Data Visualization, Geo-spatial Temporal Analysis.

M OTIV ATION
In Singapore, as well as many other nations of the world, housing
markets are characterised by the co-existence of a freely priced part
of the market with a part that is subject to varying degrees and forms
of government intervention and regulation. The Singapore housing
market has an especially complex institutional structure with its large
regulated public housing sub-sectors. The private housing price are
affected by the standard determinants of supply and demand as well
as by many government policies. However, the extent of the effects
varies across locations, time, property type, type of sales and is
influenced by factors like SIBOR (Singapore Interbank Offered
Rate).
Property transactions in Singapore require buyers to pay BSD
(Buyers Stamp Duty) for documents executed for the sale and
purchase of property. Liable buyers are required to pay ABSD
(Additional Buyers Stamp Duty) on top of the existing BSD. ABSD
and BSD are computed on the purchase price as stated in the dutiable
document or the market value of the property.
Over the last twenty to thirty years, the property prices had
witnessed a roller coaster of changes. The changes follow changes in
SIBOR and introductions of new government policies. In the most
recent decade, the economy of Singapore had rebounded back after
the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, Singapore private market prices
had heat up significantly since 2009, and they only started cooling
down when the Singapore government announced that the property
tax rates will be made more progressive over two years from January
2014. After a four-year slump until the end of 2017, the property
market started to bounce back and the prices had shown an
increasing trend. On the other hand, the US Federal Reserve’s
interest-rate had increased five times ever since President Trump
took office in Jan 2017, and there will be 2 more increases happening
in 2018. These news had already made substantial impact to
Singapore’s overall economy; when Federal Reserve Interest Rate
increases, the Singapore Interbank Offered Rate (SIBOR) will
increase accordingly. IRAS (Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore)
made an announcement in February 2018 that the property tax would
increase to 4% for properties with house price over 1 million SGD.
Furthermore, on 6th July 2018, the ABSD had increased drastically
yet again, and we are interested to see if this cooling measure will
have a strong impact on the Singapore property market.
O B JE C TIVE
Private property prices in Singapore cannot be easily analysed by
recourse either through analysis of private-sector supply and demand
or simple trend-line forecasting. Therefore, it is imperative to analyse
prices with a more thorough approach. Currently, there is no tool
which can provide an interactive and unbiased visualization for
property market. Most of the published data are still presented in
static tables and the accompanying visualizations are quite basic.
Different types of trends are illustrated statically and graphs are not
explanatory enough to show the full picture of the dataset, which
prevents readers from getting any useful insights and findings.
Our objectives for this project can thus be summarized into the
following points:
1. Visualize the relationship between units sold and SIBOR on a
yearly, quarterly and monthly basis.
2. Provide visualizations that illustrate price trends across all
administrative areas in Singapore
3. Provide an interactive and coordinated tool which shows the
density of the total number of units sold in locations, together with
the drilled-down distribution of median unit prices for a specified
area.
4. Reveal clusters of properties by their median unit price using
the Local Indicators of Spatial Autocorrelation (LISA) analysis.
5. Present all the above visualizations into a scalable, portable
and easy-to-use web application through the integration of R
packages and the usage of R Shiny framework.
R EV IE W AN D C RI TI QU E OF P AS T W OR KS
1.1 Private Property Index by URA
The Urban Redevelopment Authority provides a quarterly price
index for private residential property which is presented as a static
graph that starts from the first quarter of 1993. The drawback of the
plot provided by URA is that the index uses the 2009 Q1 figure as
the base to display price changes over the quarters. Users do not have
the options to change the base year or looking at monthly or yearly
changes.
Fig. 1. URA’s Singapore private presidential property price index.
1.2 Property Market Cycle Model
This plot shows the upward trend for property transaction volume. It
also points out every “Early Bull” and “Early bear” for investors to
draw their own insights from historical data on when is the right time
to enter the market. The aesthetics of the plot is good too, as it
includes the property price index as the reference line. However, the
main drawback of this plot is the lack of interactivity, as it does not
allow users to specify the property type or type of sale to dig deeper
into. It also lacks the ability for users to observe trends on a more
granular time interval.
Fig. 2. Property Market Cycle Model.
A N ALYTICS A PP ROAC H
To provide the ideal interactive visualization application that we
have in mind, we explored different system design and aesthetic
principles learnt in our data visualization journey. These will be
described and highlighted in detail in the following sub-sections.
This is a summary of our application creation process:
Fig. 3. The group’s approach to the project as a process.
D ATASE T AN D D ATA P REP AR ATI O N
1.3 Attribute Data
The main dataset of interest is the data of all private property
transactions in Singapore provided by REALIS. We downloaded all
the available data from years 1995 to 2018 through the SMU Library
database.
Datasets on SIBOR were downloaded from the Monetary
Authority of Singapore website
(https://secure.mas.gov.sg/dir/domesticinterestrates.aspx). We
obtained the Interbank 1-Month rates on a monthly frequency
between January 1995 and August 2018.
1.4 Geo-spatial Data
To obtain the projection system to be used for our projects, we
downloaded the Singapopre Region Boundary shapefile from
Data.gov.sg (https://data.gov.sg/dataset/master-plan-2014-region-
boundary-no-sea).
1.5 Data Preparation
Because we are interested to analyze prices from a broader
perspective, we used the dplyr package to aggregate the transactions.
In the end, we obtained a new aggregated dataset which contains the
median unit price of all transactions for each project on a monthly
basis. dplyr provides many intuitive functions that allow us to select
variables, filter unwanted rows and aggregate measures using the
summarize function.
For the LISA analysis, we need to plot the projects as spatial
points, thus geocoding is required to obtain the x and y coordinates
of projects. From the aggregated dataset, I selected the project names
and postal codes to be geocoded using Kun Sheng’s code
(https://github.com/tankunsheng/SgPostalToLatLng) which
leverages on the SLA OneMap REST API.
At the end, the aggregated dataset is used for most visualizations
in our application, while the LISA dataset is used in the LISA
analysis.
1.6 Geofacet Grid Preparation
One of the plots created using the geofacet package requires a row-
by-column grid of the locations in any geography of interest. During
this project, there were no existing grids for Singapore’s planning
areas and postal districts. Therefore, we used the Geo Grid Designer
(https://hafen.github.io/grid-designer/) to manually create the grids
based on a reference image, save them as data frames, then use them
with the facet_grid function to create facet plots that are
representative of the geography.
Fig. 4. Screenshot of our Singapore Planning Area grid in Geo Grid
Designer

Fig. 5. Reference map of Singapore Planning Areas used to create
the grid in Fig. 4.
V IS U AL D ES IGN F R AM EW OR K
1.7 Visual Structure
We applied a Top-Down methodology to establish a logical flow for
users to explore the data from a high-level Singapore overview to
deeper drill-down into the regions, areas and projects.
Fig. 6. Hierarchical view of the level of drill-down in our application.
1.8 Line Plot of SIBOR versus Units Sold
Plotly package was used to display the relationship between period
average SIBOR and total number of units sold. As these two
variables have different scales, and to avoid confusion on which
chart refers to which variable, we used dual Y-axis and differentiated
the different plots using consistent colour scheme between the charts
and the axes. The hover elements are also in the same colours as
their respective graphs, making the visualization more informative
and easier for users to gain insights. Time is plotted on the X-axis,
and users can select monthly, quarterly or yearly level of aggregation
for the variables.
Fig. 7. Number of units sold versus Period Average SIBOR on a yearly
basis.
Monthly level of aggregation was done by summing up the
monthly number of units and taking 1-month SIBOR. For the
quarterly and yearly level of aggregation the total sum per quarter
and year was calculated by taking the average of the 1-month SIBOR
over three months and twelve months respectively.
1.9 Geofacet Country Overview
Geofacet is a geoscience solution that enables seamless search and
integration of georeferenced maps. The geofacet map is created
using the geofacet package in R, and it extends from ggplot2 in a
way that makes it easy to create geographically faceted
visualizations. To geofacet is to take data representing different
geographic entities and apply a visualization method to the data for
each entity, with the resulting set of visualizations being laid out in a
grid that mimics the original geographic topology as closely as
possible.
Fig. 7. Geofacet plot of median unit prices from 1995 to 2018, facetted
by Planning Area
Fig. 8. Geofacet plot of median unit prices from 1995 to 2018, facetted
by Postal District
The advantages of applying geofacet map is that:
1. It is flexible as it provides the capability to plot multiple
variables within each geographic entity.
 2. It gives details about the subsurface structure, properties,
composition and its evolution.
3. It saves time in searching for and georeferencing the map for
exploration purposes.
We provided a user interface for users to switch between an
adaptive Y-axis and a fixed Y-axis, after which the geofacet plot will
change accordingly. This helps users to uncover different insights
which will be elaborated in Section 7.
1.10 Treemap to Reveal Market Structure
After getting an overview of price movements in Singapore using
geofacet, we move on to look at the structure of the market using
treemap visualization, as it is good for visualizing hierarchical data.
In this context, the hierarchy is defined as: Singapore -> Planning
Region -> Planning Area -> Postal District.
First, the treemap package was used to generate a static treemap
which we stored as an object. Then, we pass this static treemap to
d3tree2 function to create an interactive treemap which users can
click on to navigate between the different hierarchies of the property
market.
Fig. 9. Overall Singapore Treemap. The block size represents the
number of units sold in the area.
Fig. 10. Central Region Treemap. The block size represents the
number of units sold in the area.
The sidebar user interface allows users to choose if they want the
size of the rectangles to represent the total number of units sold in
the area, or the total number of projects with transactions in the area.
However, the treemap by itself does not reveal a lot of
information about the regions other than their relative median unit
price through the block’s color, and the number of units through the
block’s size. Therefore, we decided to use the treemap as a user
interface which is linked to a ridgeline visualization which will be
explained below. For example, if I decide to click on the Central
Region in the Singapore treemap, not only will the treemap zoom in
to display Central Region information, but there will also be a
ridgeline plot below which gives detailed breakdown of transactions
in the area.
1.11 Ridgeline Plots for Distribution of Prices over Time
We used ggridges packages to plot the ridgelines graph. The idea is
to display the density of median unit prices across different variable
levels on a consistent horizontal scale, while displaying the
additional variable information on the Y-axis, the horizontal facets
and the vertical facets.
Fig. 11. Ridgeline plot of median unit prices in Central Region.
The colour we use is “aquarium” with 0.5 opacity such that the
overlapping areas can easily be detected. As the ridgeline plot is an
extension package of ggplot, we used the facet_grid function to
segment the data by Property type and Type of Sale to have a better
comparison.
The advantages of using ridgeline plots are:
1. It allows users to view distributions of continuous variables,
while not losing view of other variables.
2. It allows users to detect sub-markets within regions or
markets. In our case, substantial outliers form a second hump which
characterize a sub-market in that particular property type.
3. It informs users how median unit price has changed over time,
as the peak for each hump may shift across the years.
4. It updates dynamically as it is linked with the treemap for the
selected location.
1.12 Local Indicators for Spatial Autocorrelation (LISA)
Typically, we compare property prices based on their absolute values
and we can only comment on whether the prices are “higher” or
“lower” than one another, but beyond that we do not know other
information about how their prices are relative to other properties
based on their location and we do not get an objective view of how
the property’s price compares with other properties in their
surroundings or in the whole nation. Therefore, we performed a
LISA analysis for median unit prices of projects and incorporated the
results into our visualizations using interactive maps. The LISA
analysis aims to reveal clusters of spatial features based on their
attributes. In our project, we aim to identify clusters of projects based
on their median unit price and identify the “hot spots” and “cold
spots”.
First, we used the coordinates function from the sp package to
create a SpatialPointsDataFrame (SPDF) of projects based on their
project names and x and y coordinates. Then, we remove projects
that have duplicated locations before passing the projection system
of the Singapore Planning Region shapefile to the new SPDF using
proj4string function.
With the new SpatialPointsDataFrame, we calculated a Local
Moran’s I statistic for each project using the localmoran function in
the spdep package. The underlying equation for each project i is as
follows:
where xi refers to the median unit price of project i, X̅ is the average
median unit price in Singapore, wi,j is the spatial weight between
project i and its neighbours project j, and:
 Based on the point pattern distribution of the raw dataset, we ran
1000 Monte Carlo simulations under the assumption that there is no
spatial pattern in the prices of private projects. After getting each
project’s Local Moran’s I statistic, we classify the projects into five
categories depending on their statistic and median unit prices relative
to Singapore’s values:
1. Insignificant: Even though I have a local Moran’s I statistic, it
is not statistically significant at the p-value of 0.1.
2. Low-low: If my price is lower than the national average and
my neighbours’ prices are as low or lower, I am a low-low point. Fig. 13. Interpretation of Local Moran’s I Scatterplot
3. Low-high: If my price is lower than the national average but
my neighbours’ prices are relatively higher than me, I am a low We also provided a sidebar interface for users to filter the
outlier among high points. property type and years they are interested in. Users can choose to
4. High-low: If my price is higher than the national average but compare the prices of any two years using the snapshot view, or they
my neighbours’ prices are not as high as me, I am a high outlier can choose the time-series view to compare prices over four
among low points. consecutive years.
5. High-high: If my price is higher than the national average and They can also tweak the values of parameters for calculating the
my neighbour’s prices are as high or high than me, I am a high-high LISA statistic. If users choose the fixed bandwidth, projects will be
point. compared with neighbours within a chosen radius from themselves.
Then, the points are plotted on an interactive map using the tmap If users choose the adaptive bandwidth, projects will be compared
package. We chose an interactive map because it allows curious with the k nearest neighbours which may exist in circles of different
users to zoom-in and explore the different projects in Singapore and bandwidths for different projects.
compare their locations and prices, which is much more flexible than
a static map which merely describes the differences from an overall
view and nothing more.

Fig. 14. User interface of Hotspot map tab

Fig. 11. Singapore map at highest zoom level

Fig. 12. Drill-down into Orchard area at lower zoom level

Human beings tend to associate red colours with hotter objects

and blue colours with cooler objects. Therefore, we used a diverging
colour scale to represent the four cluster from cool spots to hot spots.

Fig. 15. Toggle between snapshot view versus time-interval view


Fig. 16. Toggle between fixed and adaptive bandwidth
V IS U ALIZATION I N SI GH TS
From the dual Y-axis plot, we might see an inverse relationship
between SIBOR and total units sold. In general, when the SIBOR
rate increases, the number of units sold decreases. There might be
some exceptions to the inverse relationship where various external
factors such as cooling measures or economic crises happened in the
market - Asia Pacific Currency Crisis (1998), The United States
subprime mortgage crisis (2008) - making the relationship not follow
the same pattern and these are easily detected from the plot.
By looking at the geofacet plot it is obvious that the central
region has an obvious increasing trend in prices compared to the
rural area, and their absolute prices are also higher than those in the
rural area. When we apply the adaptive Y-axis to the plot, we
discover new insights previously not discoverable in the fixed Y-axis
plot. The trend of prices in the rural areas become much more
obvious, and we can see that their prices are also as volatile as those
in the central region, just that their absolute values are lower.
From the treemap, we see that the central region has the most
units sold between 2010 and 2017, and Orchard is the planning area
in the region with the highest median unit price. When we zoom into
Orchard and look at the ridgelines plot, we see the market is
extremely niche as it consists of mostly apartments and
condominiums only. Resale apartments in Orchard have an
extremely wide spread of median unit prices compared to
condominiums and compared to most price distributions seen in
other parts of Singapore.
F U TU RE W OR K
For our application we have concentrated only on private property
market and narrowed down the number of variables for our
visualization. For the future work, we might include HDB property
to have a clear picture of factors that affect private and public
properties. As a transaction record in our application we are looking
as a median price, however, including transaction records during
specific time frame for properties would be more informative to see
the changes in the price of specific properties. In order to provide
comprehensive analysis iit would be preferable to use variables such
as completion status whether the project is completed or still in a
planning stage.
L E ARN IN G E XPE RIEN CES
Orkhan: During plotting the dual Y-axis we have faced a challenge
in bringing two variables to the same scale. First, we tried to make
use of ggplot features to map SIBOR and Unit Sold in two Y-axis,
however, ggplot requires to manually scale one of the variables to
the same scale with another. By using plotly package there is no need
to scale two variables to the same base, therefore, we managed to
overcome that issue.
Joanne: As R and R packages are all open-source, there were
times when we got “surprises” while using them in our project. For
example, in the hotspot map section, I wanted to use the tm_facet
function in the tm_package to show the changes in clusters over time
using multiple facets, and make use of the “sync” argument to allow
users to have coordinated navigation across all four plots. Eventually
we discovered the leaflet output can be shown in RStudio but not in
the R Shiny application. We were disappointed because it was a
function we loved, but we eventually overcame it by plotting four
separate maps. Similar to Orkhan’s experience, there are times where
we have to explore multiple packages and ways of doing things
before we settle for one way that produces the desired output. In any
development work, it is always an iterative process where we have to
go through multiple changes before arriving at the final product. The
team must be patient and strong enough to navigate the lows together
so that we can experience the satisfaction of completing the
milestones at the end.
FU YI: When plotting ridgeline plot, I planned to plot continuous
variables on Y axis, however ridgeline can only recognize discrete
variable on Y axis and continuous variable on X axis.
As for project, it did not go smoothly at early stage. Before
deciding to settle down with Property Market Watch topic, we were
discussing about visualizing logistic and supply chain for an e-
commerce (QVC) dataset. After we sat and looked closer the QVC
dataset for 1 month, we didn’t manage to start our project, because
there are data quality issues and the data structure was not clear to
visualize from any angel, we could not find meaningful objective to
execute it.
After a university lesson, we were inspired by a hierarchical
dataset of REALIS data, immediately, we consulted Prof Kam about
our new thoughts, brainstormed some enlightening ideas with him.
By that day, our project started operating like a rocket, trying out
different visualization methods, some of them were denied and some
made significant improvement. MY KEY TAKEAWAY IS THAT, WE
SHOULD never just sit and imagine, should always try out to see
whether it is applicable.
I NS TALLATI O N AN D U S ER G U IDE
The application can be accessed at
https://joannetyy.shinyapps.io/SGPrivateProperty/. To run the
application on local machines, users are required to install a list of R
packages inside their R/RStudio environment. The list of packages
are provided in Annex A.
A C KN OW LED GM EN TS
We sincerely thank our Prof Kam Tin Seong for his consistent
support and guidance in teaching us different visualization tools
throughout the ISSS608 course, and his valuable advice given during
the many iterations which ultimately produced the final application.
R E FE RE NC ES
[1] Carson Sievert (n.d.). Plotly for R. Retrieved from https://plotly-
book.cpsievert.me/index.html
[2] Claus O. Wilke (04 April 2018). Introduction to ggridges. Retrieved from
https://cran.r-
project.org/web/packages/ggridges/vignettes/introduction.html
[3] Ryan Hafen (2018). Geofacet. Retrieved from
https://hafen.github.io/geofacet/
[4] Government Policies and Private Housing Prices in Singapore. Published
in Urban Studies, Volume 34, Issue 11, November 1997, Pages 1819-
1829. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/0042098975268
[5] Kam Tin Seong. Hands-on Exercise 10: Geographically Referenced
Attribute Analysis [PDF file]. Obtained during consultations with Prof.
Kam.
[6] Kam Tin Seong. Lesson 9: Treemap Visualization with R [html file].
Obtained during ISSS608 course taught by Prof. Kam.
[7] Monetary Authority of Singapore (n.d.). Domestic Interest Rates.
Retrieved from https://secure.mas.gov.sg/dir/domesticinterestrates.aspx
[8] Singapore Ministry of Finance (n.d.). Stamp Duties. Retrieved from A N NEX A
https://www.mof.gov.sg/Policies/Tax-Policies/Stamp-Duties
[9] Timothy Kua (2012, October 30). 1 Month Vs. 3 Month SIBO. Which is
better? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://blog.moneysmart.sg/home-
loans/1-month-vs-3-month-sibor-which-is-better/
[10] Urban Redevelopment Authority (2018, July 2). URA releases flash
estimate of 2nd quarter 2018 Private Residential Property Price Index.
Retrieved from https://www.ura.gov.sg/Corporate/Media-Room/Media-
Releases/pr18-40

A N NEX B