Singapore's housing prices recorded a new high in 2012, covering houses of residential properties and public housing flats, the city-state's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and Housing and Development Board ( HDB) confirmed their respective flash estimates on Friday.

According to the URA, private home prices in this city-state's climbed up by 1.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, much higher than the 0.6 percent increase in the previous quarter. As for the whole year, the price surged by 2.8 percent, though the pace is less than the growth of 5.9 percent in 2011.

However, the resale prices for public housing flats also recorded to a new high in Q4, a growth of 2.5 percent on quarter. For the whole 2012, the resale prices climbed 6.6 percent, which was eased compared with the double-digit growth of 10.7 percent in 2011 and 14.1 percent in 2010.

In Q4, there were totally 5,631 cases of resale transactions, a drop of 14 percent on quarter. As for the whole year, the transactions registered at 25,094 cases, up 2 percent on year.

The city-state has introduced seven rounds of cooling measures to curb the high level growth in property market. It targeted at speculations in this market by increasing extra stamp duty for foreigners, permanent residents and also the citizens.

On the other side, the government also ramped up the supply side by increasing the units of public housing flats. The HDB said it would now target to launch at least 23,000 flats in 2013 with a good geographical spread in various towns and estates.