The Headline Said 60%. The Number That Matters to You Is Closer to 200%.

The typical seller at The Minton (Hougang Ave 8, about a 10-minute walk from Kovan MRT) booked a profit of around $631,000 on a unit they bought for roughly $1.03 million. The headline you would have read called that a 60% gain. That number is correct. It is also the wrong number for understanding what your money earned.

Here is the question the headline does not ask: how much of that $1.03 million was actually yours?

The First Question Nobody Asks

When you buy a private condo at 75% LTV, you bring about 25% of the purchase price to the table — plus stamp duty and legal fees. The bank funds the rest. On a $1.03 million purchase, that means your capital in the deal looks roughly like this:

Table 1 — What the buyer actually deployed (first-property, no ABSD)

The $1.03 million purchase price was not your money. About $282,000 was.

That single sentence is the reason the "61% return" headline, while arithmetically correct, tells you almost nothing about how efficiently your capital performed. The 61% was calculated against a denominator that includes $748,000 the bank provided.

So What Did Your Money Actually Earn?

Start with the gross profit: $631,000. But there is one adjustment that must be made before the number is clean.

If you used CPF OA for your down payment — and most first-property buyers do — CPF OA interest accrues at 2.5% per year on every dollar deployed. When you sell, that accrued interest returns to your CPF account. It is not lost. It is yours. But it is not cash in hand.

On roughly $206,000 deployed from CPF over 12 years, the accrued interest is approximately $70,000. (This is a simplification — the true figure is modestly higher because monthly mortgage servicing contributions also accrue interest. The direction of the calculation is unaffected; the precise magnitude is slightly understated.)

So the honest profit split looks like this:

Gross profit: ~$631,000 Back to CPF account (accrued interest): ~$70,000 Cash-in-hand profit: ~$561,000 Return on equity deployed: $561,000 ÷ $282,000 = ~199%

The same sale. The same profit. The difference is which number you divide by.

Now compare the two framings side by side across three OCR projects — plus one RCR cross-check to show the framework holds at a different price point and hold period:

Table 2 — Two ways to measure the same sale

Gross ROE = profit before CPF accrued interest subtraction, divided by total equity deployed. For The Minton, net ROE after CPF accrued interest is ~199%. Equity deployed calculated as 25% down payment + BSD + legal fees. All figures approximate.

Three OCR projects, 49 to 97 transactions each, win rates from 96% to 100%, spanning Hougang, Pasir Ris, and Tampines. The gross ROE figure ranges from roughly 200% to 225% across all three. The finding is not a single dramatic outlier. It is the mainstream OCR private buyer experience — if measured correctly.

Parc Esta (Sims Avenue, about a 3-minute walk to Eunos MRT) is a useful sanity check. Shorter hold, higher PSF, smaller units, RCR location. The "33% return" headline sounds modest. Measured against equity deployed (~$329,000 on a ~$1.2M purchase), the gross ROE is ~121% over 5.5 years. The same reframing applies — the framework is not specific to OCR or to long holds.

But Isn't This Just Leverage?

This is the right objection to raise, and it deserves a direct answer.

Yes, leverage is the mechanism. The ROE advantage exists entirely because 75% of the purchase price was borrowed. If you had paid cash for the same property, your ROE and your return on purchase price would be identical — both around 61%.

But the conclusion to draw from that is not "leverage makes returns better." It is something more specific: the purchase price is the wrong denominator for measuring your personal return, because most of it was never your money.

When you evaluate whether property earned its place in your financial life — compared to leaving CPF in the OA account, compared to putting the same capital into an index fund — the comparison must use the same denominator on both sides. CPF OA returns 2.5% on the money you put in, not on the combined pool of your money and a hypothetical bank loan. An index fund returns a percentage of what you invested, not a blended figure that includes capital you never owned.

The purchase-price denominator is useful for one thing: comparing the absolute value trajectory of a specific asset over time. It is not useful for measuring capital efficiency — which is the question most buyers are actually trying to answer when they ask "was it worth it?"

Where the Calculation Changes — and When This Does Not Apply

The ~200% ROE figure is clean for one specific buyer profile: Singapore citizen, first property, 75% LTV, CPF used for down payment, no ABSD. Move outside that boundary and the number changes significantly.

Second-property buyers paying 20% ABSD add roughly $206,000 to the equity denominator on a $1.03M purchase. That brings the denominator from ~$282,000 to roughly $488,000. The gross ROE drops from ~224% to something closer to 130%. Still substantially higher than the "61% return" headline — but a meaningfully different number.

Cash buyers have no mortgage and no ROE advantage over return on purchase price. If you paid $1.03M in cash, your 61% total return on investment is exactly what it says it is.

HDB owner-occupiers face the same CPF accrued interest mechanism, and the equity-deployed logic applies in a parallel form. But HDB flats carry MOP restrictions, there is no rental income during occupancy, and the absence of a private resale benchmark makes the annualised comparison messier. The framework holds in structure — but the worked numbers are different, and the article would need its own brief to do it honestly.

What the Annualised Number Looks Like

Table 3 — Annualised return, two denominators (97 transactions, 96.9% win rate)

The same sale. The same 12.8-year hold. The annualised figure on the correct denominator is roughly double the figure you have seen reported — and it sits close to a number that anyone who has watched long-run equity market returns will find familiar.

Whether that comparison is flattering to property, or whether the complexity, illiquidity, and CPF complications change the picture, is the question for the next calculation.