The Sundial was offered in Punggol’s September 2003 BTO exercise. Its early history included two separate building contracts, which did not receive the same booking response.
In an explanation published in February 2004, HDB said one contract reached a 67 per cent take-up rate while the other reached 43 per cent. It decided to call a construction tender only for the contract with the higher take-up.
This is why The Sundial’s history needs more than a single launch date. An application, a booked flat and a decision to proceed with construction were different stages, and the two contracts reached different outcomes.
Choose your reading route
What the contemporary HDB explanation said · What this episode explains about early BTO history
The 20 February 2004 issue of TODAY lists HDB’s published reply about the project. A contemporary forum reproduction of that reply preserves the detailed text and its attribution to HDB’s sales department.
The reply explained that initial application response had been good, but some shortlisted applicants later chose not to book. The two contract-level booking rates therefore mattered more than an overall impression of interest.
It also said applicants who had selected a flat in the contract that did not proceed were written to about their alternatives.
The detailed figures here follow the reproduced HDB reply. The newspaper issue supplies an independently retrievable publication reference, rather than leaving the account attributed merely to an anonymous forum discussion.
The important distinction is between interest and commitment. An application expresses a wish to be considered; booking a particular available home is a later decision.
Equally, one project name can conceal more than one construction decision. Saying simply that the whole Sundial project was cancelled would erase the contract that HDB said it would tender.
A later directory or property listing answers a different question: what estate or block is being described now. It cannot substitute for the dated explanation of what happened during the original selection process.
This article records that 2003–2004 episode. It does not infer present application rules, a universal booking threshold or the move-in date of an individual household from the historical case.
