We checked 67,000 exits. Here's who loses money.
It's the forum argument that never dies: "property always makes money" vs "my friend lost $300K". Both are true — they just lived in different districts. We matched every unit bought-and-sold over five years. The pattern is brutal, and brutally useful.
Farhan Adenan · 2 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
- Across 67,354 matched five-year exits, 90.8% of sellers left with a gain — the "property always wins" crowd is mostly right…
- …until you reach the core: District 1 sellers lost money 57% of the time, with a negative median return.
- The suburbs are near-bulletproof: D28 96.7% · D19 95.5% · D20 95.3% profitable.
- The pattern in one line: the further from Orchard, the safer the exit — the exact opposite of what "prime = safe" intuition says.
POV matched-pair model: same unit bought and later sold within the five-year window, URA caveats to 23 Jun 2026. Profit before interest, taxes and fees.
The report card — all 26 districts, ranked
Find your district. Then find where you thought was “safe”.
Source: POV matched-pair model on 67,354 tracked resale exits, five-year holds, gross of stamp duty, interest and agent fees. Axis begins at 40%, not zero, to resolve a 53-point spread; the four marked districts are those below 75%.
The spread is 53 points. In D28 Seletar, ninety-seven sellers in a hundred got out ahead. In D01 Raffles Place, fewer than half did.
The $1M test
What a million dollars actually became, five years later.
Source: Median annualised seller outcome per district, compounded over five years, before interest, taxes and fees. The D01 figure is the median, not the worst case.
Why it inverts
The address premium is paid once. It does not compound.
Every buyer here is told the same thing: stretch for the best address you can carry. The exit record says the stretch is the mistake.
An address premium is paid once, on entry, in full. It does not compound. What compounds is the gap between what you paid and what the next buyer will pay — and in the prestige districts that gap has been close to flat for five years.
This is not a crash. Prices in D01 and D09 did not collapse; they simply stopped moving while the rest of the island kept going. A flat asset carrying a mortgage is a losing position, and it is a quiet one — nobody sends you a statement telling you your equity stood still.
Who this affects
Two audiences, two different readings of the same table.
If you own
Your rung is better than your postcode suggests
Equity sitting in D18, D19 or D27 is on the strongest part of the ladder in this dataset — 94.7% to 95.5% of those sellers exited ahead, at 3.5% to 4.5% a year. The live question is timing against your MOP date and your town's launch pipeline, not whether the district is prestigious enough.
Equity sitting in D09, D10 or D11 is a timing problem rather than an asset one. Selling into a district that has been flat for five years is the worst version of the trade, and the table shows how many people have already made it.
If you invest
A district that does not compound is a deposit box
Growth and prestige are separate signals, and the prestige districts fail the one that pays. D01 ran at −0.3% annualised before costs over the window. The heartland districts ran at 3.1% to 4.5%.
Compounding is the entire argument for holding property over anything simpler. A district that does not compound is a deposit box with stamp duty attached — which is why the exit record deserves a longer look than the launch brochure.
Using it
Read the district’s exit record before the project’s price list.
Source: Unweighted mean of D01, D02, D04, D09, D10, D11 against D18, D19, D22, D23, D25, D27. A 22.8-point gap in the odds of exiting ahead.
Read the exit record of the district before the price list of the project. It is the only number in this market that tells you what the person before you actually got.
"Do people lose money on property?" Yes — in very predictable postcodes.
- The base rates: suburbs ~95% win, city-fringe ~85–90%, core 43–72%. Singapore property is two different asset classes wearing one name.
- The mechanism: structural upgrader demand vs optional capital. Buy conveyors, not chandeliers — unless the chandelier is genuinely cheap.
- The discipline: in the top of the table, time forgives entry prices. In the bottom, nothing does.
Want your unit's actual exit odds?
District base rates are the start. I'll pull your project's own matched exits, your entry price against its history, and the honest hold-or-sell math. Twenty minutes.
The decay curve: what your 99-year lease actually loses, decade by decade
The exit record by lease decade — from triple digits to 49% — and the freehold twist nobody expects.
Nobody brags about D28. It has Singapore's best exit record — 96.7% profitable
96.7% of 2,321 five-year exits profitable — the best record in Singapore. Why boring wins.
How to check us: every number in this piece is computed from the primary record — URA caveats to 23 Jun 2026 — not from third-party estimates or hearsay. The links below are the official policy and news record behind the contextual claims.
- URA private residential transaction data (REALIS) — the caveat record every table in this article is computed from
- MAS · MOF · MND — "Measures for a Sustainable Property Market" (26 Apr 2023) — the official announcement lifting foreigner ABSD to 60%
- Housing & Development Board — BTO supply pipeline and Minimum Occupation Period policy
Dataset — POV matched-pair model: same unit bought and later sold within the five-year window, URA caveats to 23 Jun 2026. Profit before interest, taxes and fees.
Methodology & honesty notes. Exit records from POV's matched-pair model: the same unit bought and later sold within a five-year window, built from URA caveat data to 23 Jun 2026 (n=67,354 pairs). Profit measured before interest, taxes and transaction fees — net-of-all-costs profitability is lower everywhere, and materially lower where gross margins are thin. District medians conceal unit-level variance; the article says so where it matters. Historical base rates are not predictions. POV Realty and Farhan Adenan are not the marketing agents for any project or listing referenced, and nothing here is financial advice — it's a starting point for your own due diligence, which is exactly how we'd use it.
Farhan Adenan · CEA Registration R068636D · Senior Associate Division Director, Huttons Asia Pte Ltd (Estate Agent Licence L3008899K).