Patience Paid Off for 97% of Condo Sellers. These 9 Projects Are the Exception — and They Are All in CCR.

A seller at Marina Collection held their unit for 15 years and lost $2.4 million. Not on paper. At the point of sale, with a buyer, a contract, and a final cheque.

That is not a fluke. Across 25,271 resale condo transactions from 1,295 projects over the two years to June 2026, nine named CCR projects show sellers who held for 7 to 18 years and still walked away with less than they paid. Every single one of them is in CCR. None are in OCR. None show anything remotely close in RCR.

This article tests why. The answer is not simply "CCR is risky" or "the market stalled." It is more specific than that — and more useful if you are sitting on a CCR condo right now.

The curve says patience works

Start with what the full dataset shows.

The only dangerous window is before 2 years. Win rate goes from 58% at under 2 years to 97% at the 2–4 year mark — then barely moves for the next 8 years. Average profit climbs steadily, but your odds of winning are effectively set by year 2, not year 10.

Sellers who held more than 10 years averaged $715,863 in profit with a 95% win rate. By almost any reading, this is a strong endorsement of patience.

Almost.

That 95% win rate means 5 in every 100 long-hold sellers lost money. And when you look at which projects they came from, they cluster in one place.

The 9 projects that broke the rule

Every project across 25,271 resale condo transactions with an average loss exceeding $300,000 — and in most cases exceeding $500,000 — is in CCR. Here they are.

Marina One Residences has 56 transactions — the deepest evidence base of any loss project across 25,271 resale condo transactions. 4% win rate. That means out of every 25 sellers who transacted, only one made money. The other 24 lost an average of roughly $300,000 each, after holding for seven years.

Seascape (CCR D4, 2011) is a footnote worth acknowledging: 11 transactions, 0% win rate, split across two seller groups — short-hold sellers who exited after the 2013 ABSD crushed Sentosa demand, and patient long-hold sellers who waited more than 14 years and still lost. Both groups lost.

First hypothesis: is this a location problem?

The obvious question: is CCR structurally broken as a place to own property? If so, you would expect every CCR project to underperform. The table above covers Sentosa, Downtown Core, Newton, River Valley, and Orchard. That is a wide geographic spread. Perhaps CCR as a region simply cannot generate resale profits.

Test that hypothesis against the CCR winners.

CCR is not broken. Ardmore Park delivered an average profit of $4.8 million. Grange Residences, $4.2 million. Both at 100% win rates. These are not outliers at the top of a distribution that is mostly underwater — they represent a distinct and consistent pattern.

CCR has produced some of Singapore's most profitable resale outcomes. The loss cluster does not align with CCR as a place. It aligns with something else.

Second hypothesis: is this a timing problem?

Look at the completion years across both tables.

Every project in the loss table completed between 2009 and 2017. Every project in the profit table that regularly produced $2M+ gains completed before 2005. That split is too clean to ignore.

The most immediate explanation: Singapore's private condo market peaked in 2011–2013 on a PSF basis. Projects launched during the 2007–2012 boom cycle were priced at levels the market has not returned to. Buyers who entered at those prices are, in many cases, still waiting for the market to reach their entry point.

The URA non-landed price index grew roughly 7% between mid-2024 and Q1 2026. Even a steady upward move of that scale does not close a 30–40% gap from a 2009–2012 cycle peak. The maths on recovery is very long — possibly longer than most sellers are willing to wait.

But the timing hypothesis is not watertight either.

Sky@Eleven completed in 2010 — the same era as Marina Collection and Cliveden at Grange — yet shows a 100% win rate and an average profit of $2.2 million. Same CCR classification. Same approximate completion year. Completely opposite outcome.

Sky@Eleven sits in Toa Payoh (D11), bordering the RCR boundary, with typical units of 2,713 sqft at $2,298 PSF today. The most likely explanation: it was not launched at an unreachable PSF in 2007–2008. It entered the market at pricing that Singapore's resale demand has since validated. Marina Collection and Cliveden did not.

The Scotts Tower is the reverse complication. Completed in 2016 — after the 2013 ABSD tightening had already reset pricing expectations — yet it shows an 89% loss rate and a −$926,437 average on units of around 850 sqft. Without a confirmed launch year, the article cannot state precisely when buyers entered. But the outcome says the entry pricing on those 850 sqft units has not been recovered by resale demand.

The pattern is not "2010–2011 completion = loss." The pattern is: projects where the launch PSF has never been matched by what buyers will pay in the resale market today. Completion year is a rough proxy for this. It is not the cause.

What the OCR comparison tells you about the floor

No OCR project across 25,271 resale condo transactions — across more than 20 projects analysed — shows a negative average profit. The worst OCR outcome is Siglap V: $65,108 average profit, 72% win rate. That is a thin margin, but it is positive.

The worst RCR outcome, Reflections at Keppel Bay (2011, 118 transactions), shows a −$83,879 average profit at a 51% win rate. It is nearly flat — and notably, it is a 2011-completion waterfront project launched during the same cycle peak that destroyed Sentosa values. The connection is the entry pricing cycle, not the RCR label.

The distance between these floors is the article's most structural finding.

In OCR, even the worst-performing projects left sellers roughly whole or slightly ahead. In the CCR loss cluster, sellers with 15-year holds lost more than the entire price of an average Singapore condo. These are not comparable risk categories.

The two exceptions that matter most

Both Leedon Residence and Sky@Eleven are worth naming explicitly because they prevent this article from becoming a blanket CCR warning.

Sky@Eleven is a 2010-completion CCR project in Thomson (D11) that produced 100% win rates and $2.2 million average profits on 2,713 sqft units. It is the clearest evidence that completion era does not determine outcome — entry pricing does. Buyers who entered at a PSF the resale market would eventually exceed made money. Buyers who did not, did not.

Leedon Residence completed in 2015 (freehold, D10, Bukit Timah) and has a 96% win rate with $1.7 million average profit on 8.3-year holds across 28 transactions. It is freehold, its address draws a different buyer base than Sentosa or Downtown Core, and purchases were likely made after the 2013 ABSD cooling had already pulled CCR prices back from their 2011 highs. Whether it was the freehold status, the Bukit Timah address, or the post-ABSD entry point that matters most — the data does not separate them. But the outcome is clear: CCR buyers who entered at post-correction pricing did not suffer the fate of those who entered at the peak.

These two projects are not anomalies to explain away. They are the signal. Entry pricing relative to what the resale market will absorb appears to be the variable that matters. CCR geography, by itself, predicts very little.

The win rate plateau — the finding most readers will not expect

Return to the hold period curve, because it contains a finding that cuts against the conventional wisdom about patience.

Most people assume that the longer you hold, the safer you are — that a 10-year holder is meaningfully less exposed than a 5-year holder. The data says otherwise.

Win rate from 2–4 years: 97%. From 4–7 years: 98%. From 7–10 years: 97%. From 10+ years: 95%.

The variation across eight years of additional holding is three percentage points. That is noise, not a trend. The only meaningful risk cliff across 25,271 resale condo transactions is before 2 years — where win rate drops to 58%.

What this means: for the vast majority of projects at the vast majority of price points, whether you sell at year 3 or year 12 does not materially change your odds of making money. If you entered at a price the market will support, patience earns you more money but not more safety. If you entered at a price the market will not support — as the Marina Collection and Marina Bay Suites data demonstrates — patience does not rescue the outcome. Seven, ten, fifteen years: the win rate at those projects stays near zero.

The 10+ year cohort's win rate is actually the lowest of the four post-2-year cohorts, at 95%. One likely explanation: the CCR loss cluster projects are pulling down what would otherwise be a strongly profitable long-hold cohort. The data cannot be filtered by region to confirm this — but it is consistent with the project-level evidence.

What the data does and does not say

The hold period curve is real. Patience pays for most condo owners at most price points — the profit improvement from 2–4 years to 10+ years is genuine, moving from an average of $288,977 to $715,863.

But the curve is an average across 25,271 transactions. Inside that average is a group of CCR projects where the curve never bends upward. For Marina Collection sellers, the 15-year hold produced worse outcomes than the 13-year hold. For Marina One, the 7-year hold produced a 4% win rate. The curve's upward slope is not available to buyers who entered at a PSF the market does not revisit.

The data strongly supports one pattern: projects that completed before 2005 in CCR have produced substantial profits at high win rates, because buyers entered before the 2007–2013 pricing cycle pushed launch PSF to levels Singapore's resale demand has not recovered to. Projects that completed between 2009 and 2017 in the same region — with notable exceptions in Sky@Eleven and Leedon Residence — have largely produced the opposite.

What the data cannot say with certainty: whether the remaining 2009–2017 CCR projects still underwater will eventually recover as the market index continues upward, or whether the structural PSF ceiling on those specific projects is permanent. The URA index is up 7% over the past two years, and still well below the 2011 peak. The maths of closing a 30–40% gap from peak-era entry prices on that trajectory is a long calculation.

The two tables in this article — the loss cluster and the winners — share the same CCR postcode, the same region label, and in several cases the same districts. What separates them appears to be not where they sit on a map, but where they sat on a price list when buyers signed.

Source: 25,271 resale condo transactions across 1,295 projects, covering the two-year period to June 2026. Profits are the gross difference between exit and entry price and do not include stamp duties, agent fees, renovation costs, or mortgage interest.