The 1km edge, gone

The P1 registration changes announced by Education Minister Desmond Lee on 10 September 2026 do two things to the property market at once. Across almost every primary school, Phase 2C, the open phase for children with no prior connection to the school, grows from 40 reserved places to 60. And at 12 schools in Bukit Timah, Newton, Marine Parade and the city fringe, those 60 places are split into two equal tracks, 30 for children living within 2km and 30 for those living further away, with no home-school distance priority inside either track. For anyone who paid a premium to sit inside a 1km ring around one of those 12 schools, the second change is the one that matters, because the 1km ring no longer beats the 1km to 2km ring.

What exactly changes for P1 registration from 2027?

Two things: Phase 2C places rise from 40 to 60 at every school except smaller ones with fewer than 180 P1 places, which stay at 40, and 12 schools in low-HDB neighbourhoods split those 60 places into a within-2km track and a beyond-2km track with no distance priority inside either.

Today, Phase 2C ranks Singapore Citizen applicants by distance: within 1km first, then 1km to 2km, then beyond 2km, with Permanent Residents behind citizens in each band, and a ballot only when a band is oversubscribed. From the 2027 exercise, the 12 two-track schools keep the citizen-first rule but drop the three-band ranking. Each track ballots its own applicants for its own 30 places, and any places unfilled on one track flow to the other. Phase 1 (siblings) is untouched, and Phase 2A and 2B applicants still enter ahead of Phase 2C; the extra 20 places come out of those earlier phases, with Phase 2B keeping its 20 reserved places. The rest of the island keeps the 1km, 2km and beyond ranking, just with 60 places instead of 40.

Which 12 schools get the two-track scheme?

The 12 are the schools MOE identified where public housing makes up less than 40% of homes within a 2km radius: seven in the Bukit Timah and Newton belt, four in Katong and Marine Parade, and St Margaret’s School (Primary), whose rebuilt campus at 136 Sophia Road sits in the Mount Sophia pocket of District 9.

Does living within 1km still matter at these 12 schools?

Not in Phase 2C: from 2027, a family 900m from Nanyang Primary and a family 1.9km away sit in the same track, ballot for the same 30 places, and have exactly the same odds.

That is the single most important line in the announcement for property. The 1km ring has been the organising principle of school-driven buying for two decades, and the Bukit Timah belt is where it was priced most aggressively. What survives is the 2km line, which becomes the only distance that matters at these 12 schools, and it now cuts both ways: it is the boundary of a guaranteed half of the places, but it no longer gives a 1km address any priority over a 1.9km one. Living within 2km is still worth something. Living within 1km, specifically, is worth less than it was.

How do the odds change at a school like Nanyang Primary?

Materially worse for the within-2km cohort: in 2025, Nanyang Primary’s Phase 2C had 42 places for 63 applicants, a 67% success rate; under the two-track rules, the same near cohort would have been balloting for 30 places, a 48% rate, with the 1km families no longer at the front of the queue.

Read the table for the direction, not the decimals. The near cohort loses roughly a third of its places, from 42 to 30, and loses its internal ranking at the same time. The beyond-2km cohort, which at a school like Nanyang has had effectively no route in through Phase 2C, gains a guaranteed 30. That is precisely the outcome MOE is designing for, and it is also precisely the outcome that reprices a 1km address.

Will homes near these schools lose their price premium?

Expect the 1km premium to compress at the margin around the 12 schools, not collapse: school access is one of several things Bukit Timah and Katong buyers pay for, the 2km line still rewards living close, and the Phase 1 and Phase 2A routes still bypass the Phase 2C ballot entirely.

Two things follow. First, the schools where the premium was widest, like Rosyth, are not on the list, so their 1km ring keeps its priority and gains 20 more open-phase places on top. Second, at the 12 that are on the list, the premium was already narrower than the folklore suggests: a 5.8 point gap near Nanyang over four years is meaningful, but it is not the 20% that agents sometimes quote, and part of it is simply Bukit Timah being Bukit Timah. What the two-track rule removes is the marginal buyer who paid up for 900m over 1.5km. It does not remove the family that wants to live in Bukit Timah anyway. So expect the tightest rings to give back some of their edge to the 1km to 2km band, rather than the whole neighbourhood repricing.

What happens inside the 1km rings themselves?

Three things: the near-ring buyer pool narrows, the rental game around the 12 schools widens from a 1km contest to a 2km one, and supply stays extraordinarily tight. The supply point deserves numbers: across the popular school rings Roov studied, new homes sold within 1km fell from 444 in the first half of 2022 to 22 in the first half of 2026. Almost nothing new is being built inside these rings, which is a second reason to expect compression rather than collapse: even a smaller pool of school-driven buyers is chasing very little stock.

The rental market feels it first. A meaningful slice of 1km demand was never purchase demand at all, but families renting inside the ring long enough to register, and from the 2027 exercise that tenant needs a 2km address at the 12 schools, not a 1km one. The 2km band holds several times the rental stock of the 1km core, so expect the rent premium on the tightest addresses to soften before resale prices move. Everywhere else the ring keeps its hard edge: at the other 167 primary schools, 0.9km still beats 1.1km, and the boundary is measured to a point, not a neighbourhood. Check the measured distance before you pay for it.

As for who feels it most: in the Bukit Timah belt the seven overlapping rings cover the condo spine along Bukit Timah Road, Dunearn Road and the Coronation and Watten pockets, where one address often sits inside three rings at once, so the loss of 1km priority compounds. In Katong and Marine Parade, four rings blanket the Amber, Meyer and Marine Parade Road corridor. Around St Margaret’s on Sophia Road, the ring covers the Sophia and Mount Emily pocket of District 9. Owners there are not looking at a crash; they are looking at one of several reasons someone buys their unit being quietly repriced from 2027.

What should you do if you were about to buy near a top school?

Check whether the school is on the list, then reprice the school premium accordingly: at the 12 two-track schools, pay for the 2km line and the neighbourhood, not the 1km line; everywhere else, the 1km ring is unchanged and slightly better supplied.

For sellers holding a unit inside one of the affected 1km rings, the read is different: the premium has not vanished, but the pool of buyers who would pay specifically for the 1km line shrinks from 2027, and the smart move is to sell into the demand that exists now rather than the demand you expect to compress. For the Bukit Timah launches we covered in the 2H 2026 pipeline, where the school belt was part of the pitch, the 2km line still holds, but it is worth re-reading the brochure with the 1km claim discounted.

Next: when a good location is still a bad buy →