Problem
Practitioner and media narratives in Singapore frequently present new launches as the higher-return entry point into private housing.
This argument is often based on price appreciation observed after a project’s initial launch, including appreciation during construction and between successive developer sales phases.
However, this framing rarely accounts for what individual buyers actually paid to enter and what they subsequently realised when they exited.
It also often compares new-launch and resale price movements at the market or project level rather than comparing completed purchase-to-sale outcomes for the same physical housing units.
Approach
Using a repeat-sales methodology applied to URA REALIS transaction records from 1995 to 2026, the study constructed 155,545 completed buy-sell pairs for the same physical private residential units.
Each pair followed a unit from an observed purchase transaction to its next qualifying resale transaction, allowing realised capital returns to be classified according to the buyer’s entry type:
- new-sale entry
- resale entry
The final sample consisted of:
- 90,915 new-sale-entry pairs
- 64,630 resale-entry pairs
- 155,545 total completed pairs
The analysis applied a minimum three-year holding period and stratified the results by region, tenure, holding-period band, entry vintage, market-cycle period, and project.
Results were tested for statistical significance using Welch’s t-test and the Mann-Whitney U test.
Robustness checks included winsorisation, temporal sub-sampling, region and tenure stratification, entry-vintage analysis, holding-period analysis, same-project comparisons, and alternative treatment of sub-sale transactions.
Why It Mattered
Resale-entry buyers achieved a median annualised transaction-price return of:
- Resale entry: 3.58%
- New-sale entry: 2.55%
This represented a resale advantage of 1.03 percentage points per year at the median.
The resale advantage remained highly consistent across the principal specifications tested, including region, tenure, holding-period band, entry vintage, and market cycle.
In a same-project robustness analysis covering 755 projects where both entry cohorts had sufficient observations, the results remained similar:
- Resale entry: 3.65%
- New-sale entry: 2.61%
The return gap is consistent with a structural difference in entry price.
Across the full universe of private non-landed new-sale and resale transactions between 2021 and 2026, new launches transacted at median PSF premiums of:
- CCR: 38.9%
- RCR: 50.2%
- OCR: 62.6%
These premiums were calculated against contemporaneous resale transactions in the corresponding market region.
The paper does not claim that every new-launch purchase underperforms every resale purchase. New launches may provide genuine benefits, including modern layouts and facilities, longer remaining leases, lower immediate maintenance requirements, staged payment schedules, and lifestyle or owner-occupation value.
The narrower finding is that these benefits have not historically translated into stronger realised median capital returns.
The study measures transaction-price returns only. It excludes rental income, vacancy, mortgage interest, property tax, maintenance fees, renovation expenses, stamp duties, agent commissions, legal costs, and CPF opportunity costs.
The findings should therefore be interpreted as realised capital-return evidence at the segment level, rather than as total investor internal rates of return or predictions concerning any individual project.
