Singapore's Most Expensive Planning Area Is Also Its Worst for Condo Resale Profits

Singapore's priciest planning area is also its worst-performing one for condo resale profits — and it isn't close.

The table below ranks 14 planning areas by average seller profit, drawn from 25,271 resale transactions across 1,295 projects between Q3 2024 and Q2 2026. Downtown Core sits at the bottom as the only area with a negative average. Choa Chu Kang, Sengkang, and Tampines sit at the top. That is the inversion this article investigates.

The gap: The average Choa Chu Kang condo seller made $614k and won 99 times out of 100. The average Downtown Core seller lost $350k — and lost money on 57 out of every 100 transactions.

The table does two things at once that are worth naming. First, OCR wins on both measures simultaneously — not just on win rate, not just on absolute profit, but both. Second, CCR is not a single story. Bukit Timah ($667k, 97% win rate) and Tanglin ($875k, 90% win rate) are in the same region as Downtown Core and Southern Islands. The problem is not CCR as a whole. It is specific to three planning areas: Downtown Core, River Valley, and Southern Islands — all of which share a common history of launch prices set during Singapore's 2009–2014 global financial hub boom.

The OCR towns that no one expected to win

The obvious objection: Hougang and Punggol are partly boosted by Executive Condominiums. Hundred Palms Residences (Hougang) averaged $1.01M profit at a 100% win rate across 121 transactions — but it is an EC that reached full privatisation. EC buyers enter at a subsidised price with CPF grants attached. Their cost basis is structurally lower than what a standard private buyer pays today. Prive in Punggol (78 transactions, $657k avg profit, 94% win rate) is the same situation.

Strip those out, and the OCR story does not collapse — it holds.

The workhorses that remain tell the real story:

These are not outliers. They are the pattern — repeated across four different towns, across different completion years, across different project sizes. Treasure At Tampines alone accounts for 341 transactions at a 99.7% win rate. That is the highest single-project volume in the entire dataset.

The structural reason is entry pricing. Projects like Sol Acres, Esparina, and Compass Heights launched at roughly $1,350–$1,600 per sqft. They are now transacting at $1,450–$1,850 per sqft. That is not dramatic appreciation — but modest PSF gains compounded over seven to ten years on moderately sized units produced $500k–$740k profits, reliably, at scale.

Bedok is the one OCR area with visible internal divergence. Costa Del Sol averaged $1.0M profit (100% win rate, 71 transactions) and Waterfront Key averaged $995k (100%, 20 transactions). But Urban Vista (75 transactions, 77% win rate, $80k average profit) and Bayshore Park (55 transactions, 73% win rate, $366k average) drag the planning-area win rate down to around 90%. Bedok's strength is real — just less uniform than Choa Chu Kang or Sengkang.

What happened to Marina Bay

Downtown Core has nine projects with enough transactions to be meaningful. Eight are in negative territory or barely breaking even.

Marina One Residences: 56 sellers entered the resale market. 54 lost money. Average hold: 7 years.

The scale of this — across multiple projects, over multiple hold lengths, at multiple price points — rules out bad luck. This is structural.

Marina Bay Suites completed in 2013. Buyers who entered at launch in 2007–2010 paid into the peak of Singapore's Marina Bay global financial hub narrative, at reported launch PSF in the $2,200–$2,500 range. After an average 13.6-year hold, resale PSF is $1,931. They waited longer than a decade and still came out behind.

Marina One completed in 2017. At average hold of 7 years, sellers are transacting at roughly $2,000 PSF — below the estimated launch range of $2,100–$2,400 PSF from 2014. Ninety-six out of every hundred sellers lost money.

The plain-English explanation: Marina Bay's premium was priced in at launch, before the precinct had proven itself. The resale market has not caught up. Buyers paid for a future that has been slow to arrive.

Marina Bay Residences (44% win rate) is worth separating from that picture. It completed in 2010, and some buyers entered early enough to capture gains before the Marina Bay premium was fully established. Its outcomes are mixed — not the catastrophic record of Marina Bay Suites or Marina One.

Icon is the one genuine exception, and it has a clear explanation: it completed in 2007 and many buyers entered before the Marina Bay premium was priced in at all. Entry timing — not location — is what separates Icon from every other project in this table.

A note on the assumption that freehold tenure protects against this: Cliveden At Grange in River Valley is freehold. The average seller there lost $1.92M after nearly 14 years. Freehold did not help.

And it is not only CCR. Reflections at Keppel Bay in RCR (Bukit Merah, 118 transactions, 51% win rate, -$84k average profit) shows the same pattern — launch prices that overshot intrinsic value, this time at an RCR waterfront address. The wrong entry price is the problem everywhere it appears. It just concentrates most heavily in Downtown Core, River Valley, and Southern Islands.

Holding longer does not fix the wrong entry price

The hold-period table shows something counterintuitive.

Average profit rises with hold period, as expected. But win rate at 10+ years (95%) is lower than at 4–7 years (98%). That dip at the long end has a specific cause: CCR sellers holding 10, 14, 17 years and still posting losses. They pull the win rate down even as OCR long-holders push the average profit up.

Every project in the long-hold loss list is CCR:

• Cliveden At Grange (River Valley): -$1.92M average after roughly 14 years, freehold
• St Thomas Suites (River Valley): one transaction at -$6.3M after 14 years (the project as a whole is profitable at $444k average — this is one extreme outlier within an otherwise mixed project)
• Marina Collection (Southern Islands): -$2.43M average, 0% win rate
• Seascape (Southern Islands): -$936k average, 0% win rate
• Marina Bay Residences (Downtown Core): one transaction at -$3.58M after 19 years, a buyer from the top of the 2007 cycle

Not a single OCR or RCR project appears in the long-hold loss list. Zero.

The pattern the data reveals: holding longer tends to improve outcomes — but only where the entry price was within reason. Where launch PSF was set above what the market has since validated, additional years have not closed the gap for most sellers.

The $4M profits are a different conversation

Ardmore Park (Newton) averaged $4.84M profit across 12 transactions. Grange Residences (Tanglin) averaged $4.25M across 10. The Claymore (Newton) averaged $3.77M across 5.

These are pre-2005 freehold assets — 2,680 to 2,885 sqft, now transacting at $3,168 to $4,195 PSF — bought at a fraction of what they would cost to build today. They share a dataset with Marina One, but they are not in the same conversation as a buyer entering the market between 2015 and 2023 with a 700–1,100 sqft unit in mind.

They are also not in the planning areas that pulled CCR negative. Ardmore Park is Newton. Grange Residences is Tanglin. Bukit Timah (D'Leedon at $633k average profit, 96% win rate, 122 transactions; Leedon Residence at $1.7M average, 96% win rate, 28 transactions) is another CCR area where the numbers work. The internal fracture in CCR is real — and the article about D10's distorted average makes the same point about how outliers can mislead.

The specific problem is the 2009–2017 completion cohort in Downtown Core, River Valley, and Southern Islands — projects launched at a premium that the market has not validated in resale.

What the ranking actually shows

The planning area that commands the highest price at purchase has delivered the worst resale outcome over this period. The planning areas that buyers are told to manage their expectations on — Choa Chu Kang, Sengkang, Tampines — have delivered the most reliable profits at the highest win rates.

The data points clearly to entry pricing as the explanation. Where launch PSF was disciplined relative to what the market has since validated, sellers won. Where launch PSF was set against a narrative — the global financial hub, the waterfront lifestyle, the prestige address — and the narrative moved slower than the debt, sellers lost.

Whether the OCR towns that produced these returns will do so for the next wave of buyers depends entirely on whether entry prices at the next round of launches are equally disciplined. That the data cannot answer. What it does show, across 25,271 transactions and 1,295 projects, is that the address on the door has been a poor guide to the return in the pocket.