Singapore offers the most attainable homes among major Asian cities: report

The median price of those apartments was 4.3 times the median annual household income in the city-state last year, as shown in the 2025 Asia Pacific Home Attainability Index released last week by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a global non-profit research and education organization.

"Across all years of the Home Attainability Index, HDB apartments have been the most attainable route to home ownership in a major Asian city," said the report, which studied 51 market segments in 41 cities across the broader Asia-Pacific region and defined "attainable" as having a price-to-income ratio below five.

Even as urban housing costs climb across the region, resale prices for HDB flats have stayed accessible to median-income earners, something not seen in other major cities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Sydney, according to Singapore Business Review magazine.

HDB apartments had a median price of US$439,348, or $4,609 per square meter, while Singapore’s median annual household income was highest among the featured cities, at $101,666, the report said, adding that 80% of the city-state's population lives in HDB units.

Among major cities in the region, only two besides Singapore had a segment with a price-to-income ratio of five or lower in 2024, namely apartments in Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur and Australia's Melbourne, as reported by The Straits Times.

But across all the studied cities, apartments in Perth, Australia, had the lowest price-to-income ratio at 4.1.

Private homes in Singapore are the priciest in the region by average cost per property, coming in at $1.7 million and carrying a price-to-income ratio of 16.9.

However, on a per-square-meter basis, Hong Kong was the most expensive city for private homes, with prices averaging $16,915 per square meter and a price-to-income ratio of 23.4.