One Flat Sold Above Floor 40 in All of Bukit Merah Last Year. It Is Distorting Everything.

In April 2026, a 5-room flat on Henderson Rd sold for $1,728,000 — $1,421 per sqft, and 59% above the Bukit Merah town typical. It sits on floors 46 to 48 of Block 96A. It is the only HDB flat that sold above floor 40 in all of Bukit Merah across the entire past 12 months. There is nothing else like it in the town right now.

That single sale is why Henderson Rd looks like Bukit Merah's PSF leader. And once you understand that, the real story becomes clearer: the address is not doing as much work as people assume. The lease year is.

Henderson Rd: One Block, One Floor Band Doing All the Heavy Lifting

Everything transacted on Henderson Rd in this period came from one block: Block 96A, Henderson Rd, a 2019-built 5-room flat of 1,216 sqft with 92 years remaining on the lease. Seven sales. All the same size. All the same lease. The only variable is floor.

Here is what those 7 sales look like:

7 transactions, Block 96A Henderson Rd, Jun 2025–May 2026

Below floor 34, the price gradient is almost flat. Floor 7 and floor 25 are only $28,000 apart. Floor 7 and floor 27 span just $55/sqft. You are not paying dramatically more to go from the 10th floor to the 25th — the difference across that entire range is $65,000.

Then the building does something unusual.

The floor 34–36 unit jumps to $1,530,000 — $130,000 above floor 25–27. And the floor 46–48 unit jumps again to $1,728,000 — a further $198,000 above floor 34–36, and $163/sqft more than the floor directly below it. That is not a gradual climb. It is a cliff.

One sale. No peers in the town at that height. The floor 46–48 unit at $1,421/sqft is the ceiling — not the benchmark for what Henderson Rd delivers.

There are only three known sales ever recorded on floors 46–48 of Block 96A: May 2022 at $1,380,000, June 2024 at $1,588,000, and April 2026 at $1,728,000. The price has grown $348,000 in four years — but a comparison set of three data points across four years is thin. The floor premium is real. The sample size is not.

Strip out that one floor 46–48 transaction and Henderson Rd's average PSF drops to around $1,188/sqft. That changes the story significantly.

Boon Tiong Rd: Two Products, One Postcode

Now look at what appears to be a paradox on Boon Tiong Rd.

A floor 4–6 flat on Boon Tiong Rd sold for $1,450,000. A floor 25–27 flat on the same street sold for $1,528,000–$1,648,888. That gap is relatively modest. But some floor 25–27 flats on Boon Tiong Rd transacted well below $1,400,000 — lower than the floor 4–6 unit. How does a low-floor flat outsell a high-floor flat on the same street by six figures?

It does not. Because they are not the same product.

Boon Tiong Rd has seven blocks active in the resale market during this period. One of them — Block 9A — was built in 2016 and has 88 to 89 years of lease remaining. The other six were built between 2001 and 2005 and have 74 to 79 years remaining. They share a street address. They are not the same flat.

17 transactions, Boon Tiong Rd, Jun 2025–May 2026

Block 9A at $1,267/sqft. Block 4B at $986/sqft. A $281/sqft gap on the same street, between flats that look identical in an HDB listing — both 5-room, both roughly 1,200 sqft, both Boon Tiong Rd.

The floor 4–6 sale at $1,450,000 that looked anomalously high? That is from Block 9A, a 2016-built flat on its 88th year of lease. The floor 25–27 sale that should have been higher but wasn't? That is from one of the 2001–2005 blocks, 14 years older, with 10 fewer years of lease remaining. The floors are not comparable because the blocks are not comparable.

The PSF Reality Check: Which Street Is Actually Ahead?

At the street level, Henderson Rd has a higher typical PSF than Boon Tiong Rd — $1,221/sqft versus $1,140/sqft. But that Boon Tiong Rd average is being dragged down by the six older blocks. It is not a fair comparison.

At the block level, the picture flips. Block 9A Boon Tiong Rd, at $1,267/sqft typical, is higher than Henderson Rd's street average of $1,221/sqft. And Block 9A's top transaction in March 2026 — $1,648,888 at $1,367/sqft — sits above every Henderson Rd sale in this period except the floor 46–48 outlier.

Two different mechanisms, essentially the same destination. Henderson Rd gets there through extreme height on a 92-year-lease block. Block 9A Boon Tiong Rd gets there through lease vintage alone — from floors 4 to 33, no exceptional height required.

The Engine Underneath Both Streets

There is a simpler frame that explains all of this. Here is what the town-wide data shows for Bukit Merah 5-room flats across the same period:

162 transactions, Bukit Merah 5-room + executive, Jun 2025–May 2026

The jump from the 70–79 band to the 80–89 band is $285,000 in typical price — the single largest step across the entire table. Going from 80–89 years to 90+ adds only $20,000. The market rewards crossing the 80-year threshold heavily, and then stops caring much.

Block 9A Boon Tiong Rd sits in the 80–89 band at $1,267/sqft — above the band average of $1,153/sqft, likely because of the street's MRT access. Boon Tiong Rd is roughly 400 metres from Tiong Bahru MRT — about a 7-minute walk — while Henderson Rd is closer to a 16-minute walk from Redhill. That proximity advantage shows up in Block 9A's premium over the band average, even if it does not explain the within-street gap between Block 9A and the older blocks.

Block 96A Henderson Rd sits at 92 years — in the 90+ band, marginally above the 80–89 band in the town-wide data. Its street average of $1,221/sqft is above the 90+ typical of $1,180/sqft, which the floor-height premium explains.

The older Boon Tiong Rd blocks — 74 to 79 years, $986–$1,115/sqft — sit squarely in the 70–79 band. Everything fits. The lease cliff is the engine. The street addresses and floor heights are the mechanism by which individual blocks access it.

What Stays Open

Both premiums are structural, not random. But two specific numbers in this data are still being written.

The floor 46–48 sale at $1,728,000 is based on three historical comparables across four years. The premium at that height is real — it has appreciated $348,000 since 2022 — but there is no current peer anywhere in Bukit Merah to test it against. There is no way to know whether $1,421/sqft is the new normal for that floor band, or whether April 2026 caught an unusually motivated buyer.

Block 9A Boon Tiong Rd's $1,648,888 top transaction in March 2026 comes from a block that had only four resale sales in the three years before this period. Seven sales in one year is a step-change in market activity. The block's price ceiling may be solid — or it may still be in the early stage of discovery, where buyers who find it first pay a premium before more units come to market and supply normalises. Both possibilities are consistent with what the data shows.

What is not open: the gap between Block 9A and its 2001–2005 neighbours on Boon Tiong Rd is $152–$281/sqft and is explained entirely by the lease cliff. The Henderson Rd floor 46–48 premium is real but depends on a single annual sale with no town-wide peer. And the underlying engine for all of it — lease vintage — is the one variable that no renovation, no renovation grant, and no change of address can move.

If you own a 2001–2005 vintage 5-room flat on Boon Tiong Rd and your newer neighbour is pocketing $277/sqft more at resale, you are not looking at a gap that a fresh coat of paint closes.

BUKIT MERAH Market Intelligence · Recent Transactions

Town: BUKIT MERAH | Period: 2025-09, 2025-10, 2026-04, 2026-05 | Total transactions: 54

Key Metrics

• Highest price: $1,728,000 — Blk 96A, HENDERSON RD (1216 sqft)
• Lowest price: $688,000 — Blk 114, DEPOT RD (1259 sqft)
• Largest unit: 1485 sqft — Blk 4, EVERTON PK
• Best value PSF: $546 PSF — Blk 114, DEPOT RD

Transaction Table

20 most recent transactions by month, then price. Source: HDB Resale Flat Prices.