How to Sell Your HDB Flat: The Resale Process, Costs and Timeline

Selling an HDB flat is a well-defined process run mostly through the HDB Resale Portal, and it moves faster than most first-time sellers expect once the paperwork is in order. The two things that decide how it goes are whether you are eligible to sell at all, and whether you have priced the flat to the market rather than to your hopes. Here is the whole sequence, the costs, and the timeline.

1. Check you are eligible to sell

You must have satisfied the MOP, calculated from the date you collected the keys, excluding any period you rented the whole flat out or lived overseas. Sell before the MOP and the sale is not allowed except in narrow hardship cases. If you owned the flat with a spouse and circumstances have changed, check the ownership and occupier rules before listing.

2. Price it against real transactions, not listings

The single biggest seller mistake is anchoring to asking prices on portals — those are hopes, not sales. Price against actual recent resale transactions for the same flat type in the same town and, ideally, the same or a comparable block. Our guide to reading resale prices explains how to read the trend rather than a single outlier, and every block page shows the liveability profile a buyer is also weighing. A well-connected block near an MRT and hawker centre sells faster and holds its price; a fifteen-minute walk to the station is a discount you will feel.

3. Register your intent to sell

Log in to the HDB Resale Portal and submit an Intent to Sell. This unlocks your resale checklist, confirms your eligibility, and tells you your CPF refund and any outstanding loan so you know your net proceeds before you accept an offer. You must wait for this before you can grant an OTP.

4. Grant the Option to Purchase (OTP)

When a buyer commits, you grant them an OTP with an option fee (up to $1,000). The buyer has a 21-day option period to exercise it, during which they arrange their financing — HDB loan or bank loan — and their own eligibility. Once they exercise, both parties submit the resale application on the portal, typically within a week of each other.

5. HDB processing and completion

After both submissions HDB verifies everything, both sides acknowledge the resale documents and fees online, and HDB schedules completion — in total around eight weeks from application. On completion day ownership transfers, your outstanding loan is discharged, the CPF you used is refunded with accrued interest to your CPF account, and the cash balance is yours.

The costs sellers actually face

The refund of CPF plus accrued interest surprises people: money you took from CPF for the flat goes back into CPF, not into your bank account. If you are upgrading, that refunded CPF is exactly what funds the next home — see upgrading from HDB to a condo for how to sequence the two transactions without paying ABSD.

Agent or DIY?

The portal is designed so you can sell without an agent, and for an easy-to-sell flat in a popular town, a confident seller can. An agent earns their fee on pricing discipline, marketing reach, viewings and negotiation — most valuable for a harder-to-move flat or a seller short on time. Either way, do your own pricing homework first so you can sanity-check the advice.

Figures on this page are computed from the current snapshot and update each rebuild. Contains information from data.gov.sg (Singapore Open Data Licence) and OneMap, Singapore Land Authority. This is general information for research, not financial or professional advice.