u/Independent_String66

Made a post a couple days back analyzing the historical loss ratios on private property based on the URA data. From the comments, it seemed like a few people were trying to do the numbers on their personal situation relating to property. From what I could tell, the two most common were,

• Rent vs. buy
• Buy vs. buy a cheaper property and invest the difference

While there are a bunch of calculators online for these (I personally am a huge fan of the New York Times one), most of them are not geared towards the Singapore context of stamp duties, agent fees, and overall housing situation. These things are also a little complicated in that they depend a lot on the assumptions you make about property appreciation, your alternative investment return, inflation etc. Took a stab at creating a prototype calculator for the above scenarios, taking some inspiration from the NYT one.

I had initially meant this more for private properties but I think it could be adapted to work for HDBs as well (the core parameters are the same, I've just tweaked the hint text to give suggestions on how to adapt e.g., conservancy charges in place of condo fees etc). The calculator is fairly self explanatory but I wanted to highlight a few points / assumptions,

• If CPF OA funds are not being used for housing, then I had assumed that people are putting that towards their alternative investment through CPFIS (e.g., VWRA or some other index) instead of just leaving in the OA. While I understand there's a minimum $20k required balance for OA before CPFIS kicks in, that's relatively small for most.
• This calculator only accounts for owner-occupied / own stay properties (not investment properties)
• Most other assumptions, I've left it for people to calibrate with suggestions in the hint text in case more guidance was helpful

This is just an initial pass done with some AI help. I've done some vetting, and it seems generally sound. Hope this is useful for the people who had responded to the earlier post with numbers. Would welcome any thoughts / feedback from people.

Link to App -> https://independent-string.github.io/sgrentvsbuy/

Buy vs Buy and Invest the Difference

Rent vs Buy

EDIT: Thanks all the for comments and perspectives below. Very encouraged to see such lively chatter! A few people have mentioned that this analysis doesn't include inflation, opportunity cost, stamp duties etc + most people sitting on paper losses won't sell. All absolutely fair points, though I thought it would be good to make a clarification.

My intent with the analysis was simply to demonstrate that a fair number of SG private property transactions DO transact at a loss even when just comparing buy and sell prices. These transactions happen in spite of peoples' preferences to not sell at a loss. If we factor those sitting on paper losses, mortgage interest, opportunity costs, those will certainly further worse the loss ratios / actual losses.

To be clear, this isn't to take a view on whether SG property is a good investment or not. Good is subjective. Depends on your time horizon, alternative options, risk tolerance, and the specific property in question. Hard to generalize is my sense.

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ORIGINAL POST

At a recent dinner, I was chatting with some friends who were thinking about buying private property. Someone in the group mentioned that Sg property "will never lose money", which I think reflects a commonly held view. 

I analyzed historical private property transactions in Singapore from 1995 to 2025 using public data from URA to determine the % of properties that made or lost money and the amount of that gain or loss. This is done using "buy-sell transaction pairs" over this period i.e., if we know how much the same property was transacted for each time, we can figure out how much was made or lost in between. Given that we know the transaction dates, we can also figure out how long the property was held for. 

I used AI to help with the analysis and charting below, but I also manually verified the data using Excel pivots.

Private Property Absolute Returns (1995-2025)

Private Property Annualised Returns (1995-2025)

Returns by District (1995-2005)

Loss rate by purchase year

Here are the high-level observations, 

• Historically, ~1 in 6 private properties were sold at a loss (across all holding periods). If you exclude the late 90s which included the Asian Financial Crisis, then it's closer to ~1 in 10 
• The median return was ~23% for condos with ~3.5% median annual growth rate (CAGR); for landed, it was ~37% and ~4.8% respectively.  
• This puts the average holding period at ~7-8 years, which corroborates well with other sources and anecdotally makes sense
• Landed properties tend to have a fatter tail than condos on the upside 
• Variance of losses across districts can be significant though all districts had positive gains over time period

 

Putting aside "homes should be for living not investment" for a moment, a couple of things to keep in mind, 

• Generally, while SG properties have made money for most, there's still a decent chance of loss, Whether it's 10% or 15% of the time, it clearly happens. And I don't think anyone buys a house thinking they'll lose money. In those cases, people still sold probably due to circumstance even when it would crystallise a loss   
• This is particularly noteworthy given that property is also typically a significant chunk of net worth and a fairly concentrated financial risk.  
• These returns do not consider stamp duty, agent fees, inflation, opportunity cost  etc, which would make the returns less attractive.  
• They also do not consider the impact of leverage that could boost your returns (provided of course the return on the house > the interest rate of your borrowing)

Think a company called Urbanzoom had run a similar analysis a few years ago. Putting this refreshed analysis out here to help to create more informed perspectives as people think about homebuying and their personal financial plans.