SINGAPORE: Dr Koh Hui Hiang, 61, wants her retirement years to be spent in a place where help is close at hand, especially if she becomes immobile one day.

A Community Care Apartment, which bundles senior-friendly housing with care services, could have been just that. But Dr Koh, an associate lecturer in optometry, would only have turned eligible at 65 under the old rules.

On Monday (Jul 13), the government announced that the eligibility age for such apartments will be lowered from 65 to 55, effective from the next application exercise. Monthly basic service package fees will also be cut.

“I'm 61 years old, I could have applied for this, right? But I suppose I missed the boat,” said Dr Koh, who applied for a short-lease two-room Flexi flat a few years ago.  

For seniors like her, the changes mean earlier access to aged-care housing options. Still, property and gerontology experts said that demand for these apartments is unlikely to rise significantly in the near term.

All things being equal, a wider pool of buyers should lift demand, said Mr Nicholas Mak, chief research officer at Mogul.sg. But he pointed to "mental obstacles" that keep seniors from applying, including a narrow profile of buyers that the apartments tend to appeal to, such as those with health or mobility issues.

“I think it's going to increase demand quite marginally – very, very little. It's not going to open the floodgates.”

FALLING APPLICATION RATES

The lowered age threshold takes effect from the October 2026 Build-to-Order (BTO) sales exercise, and comes amid falling application rates for Community Care Apartments.

HDB has launched five such projects so far, in Bukit Batok, Queenstown, Bedok, Geylang and Sengkang.

The first, Harmony Village@Bukit Batok in 2021, drew an application rate of 4.2 – or about four seniors vying for each unit. The latest, Fernvale Plains in Sengkang, was undersubscribed at 0.7.

Associate Professor Wee Shiou Liang from the S R Nathan School of Human Development at the Singapore University of Social Sciences said the decline reflects a preference to age in place rather than any flaw in the flats themselves.

“Most seniors want to stay put. Familiarity matters enormously in later life – o...