Bala's Table: How Much Value You're Losing Each Year and When to Get Out

The value you're losing every year has an official name, and it is not folklore. It is the Singapore Land Authority's official Leasehold Table, used since 1948 to calculate the land premium payable when a lease is topped up, converted from one use to another, or when state land is alienated. It is widely believed to have been prepared by a Land Office employee named Bala under British colonial administration, and the name stuck. SLA published the table openly on its website from 31 July 2000, and it has since become the industry's default reference for what a leasehold discount "should" look like.

The logic is straightforward once you see it stated plainly. A buyer of leasehold land is really buying the right to a stream of rental income for a fixed number of years — not the land itself. Money received sooner is worth more than the same money received decades later, so that future income stream gets discounted back to a present value. The percentage in the table is simply that discounted value, expressed as a share of what the same land would be worth with no expiry date at all (freehold).

Three reference points anchor the whole table, confirmed in Motha and Yuen's Singapore Real Property Guide (1999) and unchanged since: a 99-year lease is worth 96% of freehold value. A 60-year lease is worth 80%. A 30-year lease is worth 60%. Notice the shape — the first 39 years of decay (99 to 60) cost you 16 percentage points. The next 30 years (60 to 30) cost you another 20 points. The curve is not a straight line. It steepens.

Selected values from SLA's Leasehold Table (full table runs year-by-year from 1 to 99). Source: Centre for Liveable Cities, 2017, Appendix 1.

Where the Numbers Come From

CLC researchers who reverse-engineered the table found that it is closely — but not exactly — approximated by a standard present-value formula at a 3.5% discount rate: the leasehold percentage equals 1 minus (1 divided by 1.035, raised to the power of the remaining years). At 99 years that formula produces 96.7%, essentially matching the table's 96.0%. But in the middle of the curve — 35 to 55 years remaining — the formula and the official table diverge by 5 to 7 percentage points, because the table's author rounded the six landmark years (10, 15, 20, 30, 60, 99) to convenient whole numbers and interpolated everything else by hand. That is why this article gives you both the real table and a rough formula — they are close, but not identical, and knowing the difference matters for Move 3 below.

Bala's Table was built to price land, for the purpose of calculating a government premium. It was never designed to predict what a specific resale unit will fetch at the negotiating table — and treating it as a precise resale calculator is the single most common misuse of the table among buyers and sellers alike.

Two things sit on top of the curve and matter more, in practice, than the raw percentage. The first is the financing cliff: CPF usage is pro-rated once your remaining lease no longer covers the youngest buyer to age 95, and bank loan tenures compress sharply once the lease drops toward the 30-year mark. These are policy overlays, not part of Bala's Table itself — a property can sit at a perfectly respectable 75% on the curve and still face a shrinking buyer pool because the next purchaser can't get the CPF or loan quantum they expected. The second is condition and governance — a 45-year-old building's sinking fund position, deferred maintenance, and MCST track record are not inputs to Bala's Table at all, but they show up in the price a real buyer is willing to pay.

This is the practical answer to "when is a good time to get out": not the moment the Bala percentage crosses some round number, but the moment your buyer pool starts to narrow because financing is tightening around them. That narrowing is visible well before the lease itself is in any danger — CPF pro-ration typically starts to bind in the 50–60 year band, long before the "cliff zone" below 30 years most owners fixate on. Speak to a licensed financial adviser or your bank for advice specific to your own CPF and financing position — what follows is the general mechanic, not personalised advice.

Here is where that gap becomes visible with real numbers. Braddell View and Lakeview — two privatised HUDC estates in District 20, completed 1977–1981 — currently sit at roughly 50–51 years remaining, which Bala's Table prices at 74.7–75.2% of freehold value. JadeScape, a modern development roughly two kilometres away with a fresh-ish 99-year lease, transacts at approximately $2,296 psf. If you scale JadeScape's psf down using nothing but the ratio of Bala's Table values (75.2% ÷ 96.0%), the tenure-only adjustment implies a rough ceiling of about $1,799 psf for a similarly-located 51-year asset. Braddell View actually transacts at approximately $1,041 psf — a gap of roughly 42%, well beyond what lease decay alone explains.

That gap is not a pricing error. It is the market pricing in everything Bala's Table leaves out: 45-year-old lifts and waterproofing, a sinking fund carrying more risk than a five-year-old building's, and — as the full analysis linked below covers — an en bloc story that has failed three times since 2017. The curve tells you the floor. It does not tell you why the actual price sits well below even that floor. For the complete governance and en-bloc-probability picture behind these two estates, see Braddell View vs Lakeview: What the Numbers Say and Braddell View En Bloc 2026: The Thomson View "Success" Trap.

The Projects Most Exposed to This Curve

Braddell View and Lakeview aren't isolated cases. They're two of seven privatised HUDC estates in Singapore that have never gone en bloc — all built on 99-year leases commenced between 1973 and the early 1980s, which puts most of them somewhere in the 44–55 year band today, squarely on the steep part of the curve above. The gold arrow marks the two with a full published analysis on this site.

"Est. remaining" for Pine Grove, Laguna Park, Neptune Court and Lagoon View reflects the general 1973–early 1980s lease-commencement window reported for the surviving HUDC cohort, not individually verified title data — confirm the exact figure for any specific unit against its title deed. Braddell View and Lakeview figures are individually sourced (see linked article). Sources: HUDC Singapore (hudcsingapore.com, 2026); Homejourney.sg, Ivory Heights project data; PropertyGuru, Laguna Park listing data.

Ivory Heights is the outlier worth noting — its lease only commenced in 1986, five to nine years after the other six, which puts it at roughly 60 years remaining rather than the mid-40s to low-50s the rest of the cohort sits at. That gap alone is a reminder that "HUDC estate" is not a single risk category: two estates a short drive apart can be a decade apart on the curve.

You don't need the full 99-row table to get a usable estimate of what you're losing. Here is the method, in five steps, using Braddell View's real numbers as the worked example.

This method is intentionally rough — it assumes two different buildings in two different locations are otherwise comparable, which they never fully are. Use it to sense-check a listing or your own unit before a conversation with a valuer, not as a substitute for one.

Reading the Cliff, Not Just the Curve

The curve tells you what you're losing. The cliff tells you when that loss stops being theoretical and starts shrinking the number of people who can actually buy from you. Two markers are worth watching, both grounded in policy mechanics rather than sentiment: the point where your remaining lease starts failing to cover a 25-year-old buyer to age 95 under CPF rules (pro-ration begins), and the point where mainstream bank loan tenures compress because the lease itself is running out faster than a standard loan term. For most 99-year leasehold properties, the first marker lands somewhere in the 50s-remaining band; the second tightens hard once you're inside 30 years.

James's own position, based on the mechanics above rather than any forecast of where prices are headed: owners sitting in the 45–60 year band are the ones with the most room to plan calmly — a full pool of financeable buyers, and enough runway to decide between holding, right-sizing, or exiting on their own timeline rather than the cliff's. That is an observation about financing mechanics, not a recommendation to sell. Whether holding, right-sizing, or exiting makes sense for your specific unit depends on your own numbers — run them, or have them run, before the pool narrows rather than after.