Reading Singapore price trends through exits
Data updated —
Most price-trend charts describe the market. This one describes the people who left it. Every figure on this page is built from matched transaction pairs — the purchase caveat and the eventual sale caveat for the same physical unit — so a gain here is not an index movement or a valuation, it is money a real seller banked. Between January 2018 and April 2026, this dataset captures 32,414 such exits across 199 condominium projects, and the median one looks like this: bought, held about 7.9 years, and sold for roughly $280,000 more — a gross gain of about 25%, which annualises to about 3.6% a year before stamp duties, interest and agent fees.
What this dataset is — and is not
Be clear-eyed about one thing before drawing conclusions: this dataset records profitable exits only. Unprofitable sales are not included, so nothing on this page tells you the probability of making a gain — only the size and shape of the gains that were made. That selection effect matters most where you would expect losses to concentrate: prime districts bought at peak prices, and short holds forced by circumstance. Read every median here as "what profitable sellers made", never as "what every seller made". It is also why we lean on medians rather than averages throughout — a handful of multi-million-dollar exits would otherwise drag every figure upward.
The quiet story: the fringe out-ran prime
The quarterly psf chart at the top of this page holds the clearest trend of the window. Median exit psf in the Rest of Central Region — the city fringe — rose from about $1,500 in 2018 to about $2,050 by early 2026, a gain of roughly 37%. The Core Central Region managed about 23% over the same stretch, and the suburbs about 18%. The fringe did not just keep pace with prime; it closed most of the gap, compressing the RCR-to-CCR discount from around $230 psf to under $100. Whether that compression is a new equilibrium or a stretched one is the single most consequential question for anyone choosing between a fringe launch and a prime resale today.
Entry year beat almost everything else
Cut the exits by the year the unit was bought and the market's memory becomes visible. Units bought in the 2011–2013 run-up — the peak before the cooling-measure era — exited at median annualised returns of barely 2.1–2.3% a year, often after a decade of waiting. Units bought in 2020 and 2021, into the pandemic trough, exited at 5.9–6.2% a year. The same island, the same asset class, a three-times difference in compounding — determined mostly by the year of entry. This is also why the holding-period chart shows its counterintuitive dip: the 7–10 year band looks like the worst place to sell not because time hurts, but because in this exit window that band was full of 2011–2013 buyers. Holding period and entry cohort are two views of the same underlying truth: price cycles are long, and buying into a peak costs years, not months.
New sale or resale entry — the honest comparison
Across all exits, resale-entry units actually posted the higher median annualised return — about 4.3% a year against 3.5% for units bought at launch. That headline flatters resale unfairly: most launch-bought units exiting in this window were bought in the heavy-supply years around the last peak, while resale entries are spread more evenly across the cycle. Compare like with like — the same three-to-five-year holding band — and launch-bought units come out ahead. The practical reading is not "new beats resale" or the reverse; it is that the entry price relative to the cycle dominates the entry channel. A well-priced resale beats an overpriced launch, and vice versa.
Districts: percentage growth lives where quantums are small
The district ranking inverts the usual prestige table. Districts 5, 28, 21 and 20 — Clementi and the west coast, Seletar, the Clementi–Bukit Timah corridor, Bishan–Ang Mo Kio — all cleared 4% a year at the median, while Districts 9, 2 and 7 sat between roughly 1% and 2.3%. Prime property preserved larger absolute gains per exit, but as a percentage of capital deployed, the suburbs and fringe compounded faster over this particular window. For an investor thinking in returns on equity rather than trophy addresses, that distinction is the whole game — and it is exactly the kind of pattern that only matched exit data, rather than asking-price indices, can show.
How to use this page with the rest of our research
This dashboard is the historical half of a pair. The forward-looking half is our new launch and GLS pipeline tracker, where land costs foreshadow the launch prices of 2027 and 2028, and the new launch price tables, which show what today's developers are charging by bedroom type. The discipline we would suggest: use this page to understand what entry timing, holding period and location have historically done to returns, then judge any launch you are considering against that base rate — not against the show-flat brochure. If a project's pricing implies you need fringe-at-2021 style appreciation to break even after stamp duties, the exit data tells you how often that has actually happened.
All figures are compiled from URA caveat data and public project records, are indicative, and change as new caveats are lodged. This page is research, not advice — verify current figures before making any decision.