Singapore home prices suffer first quarterly drop in three years

Singapore's private home prices suffered their first quarterly drop in nearly three years as government measures to cool the property market begin to bite at the high end. According to advance estimates from the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) on Monday, private home prices fell 0.1 percent in January-March from the last three months of 2011. It was the first decline since the second quarter of 2009.
Prices of non-landed private residential properties in the core central region fell by 0.9 percent, reflecting weakness in the high end of the property market. The mass market remained healthy as prices of apartments outside the central region rose by 1.2 percent from the preceding quarter. Separately, an index of resale prices for government-built HDB apartments showed prices edged up 0.6 percent in the first quarter from the preceding three months, slowing from a rise of 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter.