Most buyers spend months choosing a project — the district, the developer, the launch — and then make the single most consequential decision of the purchase in about fifteen minutes at a showflat table. Which unit. The evidence from completed projects is uncomfortably consistent on what that fifteen minutes is worth: inside one development that completed in 2025, every sub-sale made money, and the gap between the smallest gain and the largest was three quarters of a million dollars. Same project. Same market. Same four years.
$749K
spread between the smallest and largest sub-sale gain inside a single 2025-completed development
15 of 25
projects launched 2018–2020 where low-floor units out-returned high-floor units at resale
14,929
unsold uncompleted private homes as at 2Q2026, down 7.2% on the quarter
The variance is inside the project, not between projects
Thirty private condominiums completed in Singapore during 2025, delivering 6,123 homes into a market whose price index had risen 32.5% between the first quarter of 2021 and the last quarter of 2025. That is the backdrop against which almost every one of those owners sold or held. Across the whole cohort, only five sub-sale transactions were unprofitable.
A rising tide that comprehensive is exactly what makes the next number interesting. One of those projects, Pasir Ris 8, recorded forty sub-sale transactions. Every single one of them was profitable. The smallest gross gain was about $36,000. The largest was about $785,000 — on a 1,055 sqft unit that sold for $2.32 million after roughly four years.
Nobody in that building timed the market differently from anybody else in it. They bought at the same launch, held through the same index, and sold into the same demand. The 21-fold difference in outcome was decided before any of them had exchanged contracts, by which unit they picked off the same price list.
Gross gain on sub-sales in one development
Forty sub-sale transactions, one project, all profitable
Sub-sale transactions in a development completed in 2025, as compiled from caveat data. Gross gain before transaction costs, stamp duties and holding costs.
This is the case for taking stack selection seriously, and it does not depend on anyone predicting anything. It only requires accepting that the price list you are handed at a showflat is a set of guesses made by a developer months earlier about relative value inside their own building — and that some of those guesses are wrong in your favour.
You have the evidence. Now the method.
Six checks between you and the wrong unit
You’ve seen the evidence. The full guide gives you a repeatable method for comparing stacks, spotting hidden compromises and deciding whether a premium is worth paying.
The 1.5% / 9% rule — the two thresholds that decide when to pay up for a better facing and when to take the discount for a worse one, and why everything between them is noise.
The landmine families that cost one documented buyer $211,000 in forgone profit — and the one place on the site plan they are visible.
The switching strategy, the showflat checklist, and a live calculator that prices a stack premium in floors, dollars and risk.
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What the market charges for height, and what it pays back
The most common shortcut in the room is height. Higher floor, better unit, higher price — and developers price accordingly, in a graduated ladder that gets steeper as the units get bigger. Across Singapore transaction data, the average step per floor works out at roughly $3,300 for a one-bedroom and roughly $12,600 for a four-bedroom.
Average price step per floor, by unit size
The increment the market applies for one storey of height
Analysis of Singapore condominium transactions by floor level and unit type.
Those numbers are useful as a benchmark: they tell you what a floor is worth in the market’s own currency, which is the only sensible way to judge whether a stack premium is large or small. What they do not tell you is whether the premium survives.
The premium the developer charged, and the premium the resale market returned
Measure
At launch
At resale
Average price effect per floor
+$6,439
−$9,428
Projects where low floors out-returned high floors
—
15 of 25
Typical swing on the per-floor effect
—
over $75,000
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Twenty-five projects launched between 2018 and 2020, comparing the developer’s launch-stage floor premium against the effect of floor level on subsequent resale prices.
Read the middle column against the right one carefully, because it inverts the received wisdom. At launch, buyers paid an average of about $6,400 per floor for height. When those same buildings started trading on the resale market, the floor level was associated with a negative effect of roughly $9,400. In fifteen of twenty-five projects, the units nearer the ground did better.
The mechanism is not mysterious. A launch price list is a menu with no comparables; a resale market is a comparison between listings that a buyer can walk through in an afternoon. Height sells well when it is the only variable on the page. It sells much less well when a buyer is standing in a lower unit that costs $150,000 less and looks at something more interesting.
Two documented pairs, four units, one lesson
Averages settle arguments badly. Here are two pairs of actual transactions instead. Within each pair the project is the same, the layout is the same, and the entry years are the same. The only difference is which unit the buyer chose.
Return on the same floor plan in the same development
Two documented pairs. Within each pair: same project, same layout, same launch
Documented transactions with entry between 2019 and 2020 and exit before 2024. Return is gross profit over entry price, before transaction costs and holding costs.
The first pair: the “prestigious” unit lost
Unit
Entry
Exit
Hold
Profit
Return
11F · landed view
$1.634M
$1.910M
4.3 yrs
$276K
17%
4F · pool facing
$1.555M
$1.911M
3.7 yrs
$356K
29%
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Same development, same 3-bedroom-plus-utility floor plan, both purchased in 2019.
The buyer who took the low-floor pool-facing unit — the one most buyers reflexively skip because of the floor number — exited seven months earlier, for a marginally higher price, having paid $79,000 less to get in. Eighty thousand dollars of extra profit, and the money back in hand sooner.
The second pair, which you will meet in full further down, is the opposite lesson: there, the higher unit was worth every cent of its premium, because seven floors of height was the difference between a view and a retaining wall. Height is not the variable. What the unit actually sees, and how easily a future buyer can be made to want it, is the variable.
The sequence, in order
The order matters more than any individual step. Almost every expensive mistake in stack selection comes from doing this backwards — starting at the price list, forming a preference, and then rationalising it. Rank first. Price last.
1
Rank before you priceRead the developer’s own placement decisions off the site plan and rank every stack in your target layout, best to worst, before you look at a single number. Your ranking is only useful if it was formed independently of theirs.
2
Avoid the crowdWork out what share of your unit type shares your facing and your layout. If most of the inventory looks like yours, your future buyer has one lever to negotiate with, and it is price.
3
Hunt the mispricingDevelopers price in batches. Where two stacks carry the same price and see materially different things, the difference is being given away. Take it.
4
Clear the landminesBin chutes, substations, retaining walls, gym windows, gantry noise. These do not cost you anything at entry. They cost you at exit, when a buyer finds one and asks how much less.
5
Apply the two thresholdsPay up for a materially better facing only if the premium is under 1.5%. Accept a materially worse facing only if the discount is over 9%. Everything in between is paying real money for marginal difference.
6
Switch layouts, not stacksIf the best stack in your target layout still ranks poorly, the answer is rarely the second-best stack in that layout. It is usually the layout one size up or one size down that has a genuinely good stack available.
Read the site plan before the price list exists
Long before a developer publishes prices, they have already told you which parts of their own development they consider premium. They did it when they decided where to put the four-bedrooms and the five-bedrooms.
Large layouts are not scattered at random. They are placed where the outlook is longest, the privacy is highest and the immediate neighbours are fewest, because those are the units that have to justify the highest quantum in the building. Find the 4BR and 5BR stacks on the plan and you have found the towers the developer’s own project team ranked first.
What the plan is telling you before anyone quotes a price
Signal on the site plan
What it usually means
How to verify it
Fewer units per tower / per floor
Deliberate low-density positioning
Count units per floor plate across every block
Largest layouts on one side
That side has the outlook the team rated highest
Trace where the 4BR and 5BR windows point
Wide tower-to-tower spacing
Privacy and a view that will not be built out internally
Measure block-to-block distance on the plan, not by eye
Buildings pulled back from a boundary
The developer is managing a known negative
Check what sits on the other side of that setback
An unusually blank edge of the plan
Something outside the site is doing the damage
Pull the URA Master Plan zoning for every adjacent plot
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Placement signals are directional, not deterministic. Treat them as a hypothesis to test against the price list, not as a conclusion.
That last row is where the real work is, and it is the step almost nobody does. The market prices position ruthlessly — and it does so at every scale. Between districts, indicative new-launch pricing in 2026 runs from roughly $1,700 psf in the far north to well above $4,000 psf in the prime central districts, a spread of more than double for the same square foot of concrete.
Indicative new-launch pricing by district, 2026
Midpoint of published launch ranges, Singapore dollars per square foot
Midpoints of indicative 2026 new-launch price ranges by district. Indicative only; actual launch pricing varies by project, tenure and unit type.
Inside a single development, the same logic operates on a smaller scale: a higher-floor unit commonly carries a premium of roughly $100 to $200 psf over an otherwise identical lower unit. That figure is worth memorising, because it is the yardstick for every judgement that follows. When you find two stacks priced the same that clearly should not be, the gift you have been handed is measured in exactly those units.
So the discipline is simple and slightly tedious. Rank every stack in your layout from best to worst on placement alone. Write it down. Then open the price list and look only for disagreements between your ranking and theirs. Agreements tell you nothing. Disagreements are the entire opportunity set.
The price war you sign up for at TOP
Consider a development where 85% of the one-plus-study units share the same facing and the same layout. On the day of launch that is invisible and irrelevant. Four years later, at completion, it is the only thing that matters, because your future buyer is scrolling through dozens of listings that are — in every respect a listing photograph can convey — identical.
When nothing distinguishes the units, the only remaining variable is the asking price. That is not a market; it is an auction in reverse, and you are one of the sellers.
Gross profit on successive sub-sales of one homogeneous layout
Same development, same one-plus-study configuration, sequential transactions
Sub-sale gains on a single unit type within one development, as reported. Figures approximate and rounded.
Nothing changed in the supply. No new blocks were released, no policy landed, no comparable development completed next door. What happened is that differentiation stayed at zero, so the price floor drifted down to whoever needed to sell most. Being brand new is not a differentiator when two hundred of your neighbours are also brand new.
The 2026 market makes this failure mode more expensive than it was, because the index is no longer bailing out an undifferentiated unit. In the second quarter of 2026 the overall price index rose 0.5%, but that headline was carried almost entirely by landed housing.
Where the price index actually moved in 2Q2026
Segment
Quarter-on-quarter
Landed
+2.5%
Non-landed — Core Central Region
+1.8%
Non-landed — overall
−0.1%
Non-landed — Outside Central Region
−0.1%
Non-landed — Rest of Central Region
−1.2%
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URA private residential property price index, 2Q2026, quarter-on-quarter.
For an apartment buyer that table is the whole warning. Non-landed prices were flat to negative in the quarter, and in the Rest of Central Region — where a large share of recent launch supply sits — they fell 1.2%. In a market moving sideways, differentiation stops being an optimisation and becomes the thing that gets your unit chosen at all.
The hedge is not complicated. Take the minority facing when the price gap is small. Take the irregular floor plan, the roof terrace, the dual-key, the L-shape — anything that gives a future buyer a sentence to repeat to their spouse. And be honest about the dominant inventory bucket: if you are buying the same thing as two hundred of your future neighbours, you have agreed in advance to compete with two hundred people on price alone.
The gift developers do not know they are giving
Developers price in batches. A pricing team works through stacks in groups, sets a level for the group, and moves on. It is an efficient way to price several hundred units in a week and a poor way to capture what any individual unit actually looks at.
Three stacks, one price, three different stories
Stack
What the unit actually sees
Price
Stack 1
Windows of the neighbouring condominium
Same
Stack 9
Pool of the neighbouring condominium
Same
Stack 10
Tennis court of the neighbouring condominium
Same
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Three identical-layout stacks on the same floor level in one development, priced identically.
Every one of those three units is looking at somebody else’s development. Two of them are looking at somebody else’s amenity. On resale day, a pool view and a tennis-court view each become a marketing photograph and a reaction in the viewing room. A view of a neighbour’s bedroom window becomes an objection to be managed.
At the same price, that difference is free. Set against the market’s own within-project increment of $100 to $200 psf, taking the better of two identically priced stacks on a 1,000 sqft unit is worth somewhere in the region of $100,000 to $200,000 of positioning you did not pay for.
Finding these requires looking outside your own site plan, which is the step most buyers skip because the sales gallery does not hand it to you. What your unit sees is determined by the neighbour’s layout at least as much as your own. Pull the adjacent developments’ plans. Find the alignment, not just the compass direction — two units both described as “north facing” can be looking at a car park and a reservoir respectively.
Look up as well as across. A pocket of open view over a school, a place of worship or a low-rise strip often runs much further than it appears from the ground, sometimes all the way to a landed enclave — and it is frequently visible only from a specific band of floors. That band is rarely the band the developer priced highest, because the pricing team was working from a spreadsheet of floor numbers rather than from the twelfth-floor window.
The flaw your buyer will find, and price
The things that cost you money at exit are visible from above, not from the showflat window
Reframe who you are buying for. Your future buyer is not going to walk into your unit and volunteer a premium for a nice view. They are going to walk in, look for the flaw, find it, and open the negotiation from there. Everything in this section is about not handing them one.
Unsightly and smell — the foundational screenBin chutes, refuse compactors, substations, pumping rooms. Experienced buyers check these first and disqualify fastest on them. They are all marked on the site plan, and they are all easy to miss when you are looking at the plan for the swimming pool.
Privacy — the one you only see in three dimensionsMulti-storey car parks where a driver on the fifth deck can wave into your living room. Gym windows aligned with a bedroom. An elevated walkway at eye level. None of this is legible on a flat floor plan; all of it is obvious on the 3D site model.
Noise and line of sightMRT track exposure, expressway adjacency, and units facing the gantry where every arriving car sweeps its headlights across the façade. Noise is the landmine buyers forgive least, because it cannot be renovated away.
The empty plot you assumed was a parkAny vacant land your unit faces has a zoning and a plot ratio attached to it in the URA Master Plan. Check every one of them. A view that disappears in year six was never part of the price you paid, but it will be part of the price you get.
Quantum sensitivity — why this compoundsThe higher the price band, the less tolerance a buyer has. Below a certain quantum a landmine costs you a discount. Above it, the landmine costs you the sale entirely, because a buyer with that budget simply moves to the next listing.
The cost is not theoretical. Two units in the same stack, seven floors apart, in the same development, bought within the same window. The lower unit’s outlook was bisected by an external retaining wall — a structure that appeared on the 3D site model and on no floor plan anywhere.
A retaining wall, two units, a $211,000 gap
Unit
Entry
Exit
Profit
Return
2nd floor · view cut by the wall
$1.484M
$1.800M
$316K
21%
9th floor · clear of the wall
$1.583M
$2.110M
$527K
33%
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Documented transactions in one development, same stack, same layout, seven floors apart.
2nd floor · below the wall
21%
9th floor · above the wall
33%
Ninety-nine thousand dollars more to get in. Two hundred and eleven thousand dollars more profit on the way out — a return more than half as high again, for being seven floors above something the floor plan never showed. Set that $99,000 entry premium against the market’s average step of roughly $9,400 per floor for a three-bedroom and it prices out at almost exactly ten and a half floors of ordinary height. The buyer paid the standard rate for height and received a landmine removal for free.
Note also that this is the same reference unit as the layout comparison further down. One purchase, two separate ways it was beaten by an alternative on the same price list.
Two thresholds that turn preference into arithmetic
Once the stacks are ranked, the landmines are cleared and the mispricings are identified, exactly one question remains: pay up for the better facing, or take the discount for the worse one. Two numbers make that decision mechanical.
Premium worth paying for a materially better facing
under 1.5%
The no-trade zone — paying real money for marginal difference
1.5% – 9%
Discount required to accept a materially worse facing
over 9%
The 1.5% threshold is the level at which a materially better facing reliably repays itself through a faster sale and a stronger negotiating position at exit. Below it the upgrade is close to free. Above it you start needing the view to do work that views do not reliably do.
The 9% threshold runs the other way. A worse facing carries a longer sale cycle and a harder negotiation at exit, and 9% is roughly where the discount compensates you for both. Between 1.5% and 9% is a no-trade zone: either you are paying real money for a marginal improvement, or you are accepting a real handicap for a marginal saving.
The rule applied across seven facings in one project
Stack option
Price vs the internal-pool base
Decision
Stacks within 0.5%, shorter block-to-block distance
+0.0% to +0.5%
Eliminated — less privacy at the same price
Landed-facing stack
+1.4%
Switched in — inside the rule, materially better outlook
Pool-and-clubhouse stack
+3.3%
Eliminated — outside the rule, not differentiated enough
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Worked elimination across seven facings — pool, lawn, landed, tennis-court-and-park and others — in a single development.
Look at what the rule did to the middle row. A landed-facing stack at a 1.4% premium is a different unit in every way a resale buyer cares about, for roughly $21,000 on a $1.5 million purchase. The pool-and-clubhouse stack at 3.3% is a nicer view for about $50,000, which is over five floors of height at the three-bedroom rate — and clubhouse frontage brings its own noise and traffic. One is obviously worth doing. One is obviously not. The thresholds are what let you see that in ninety seconds rather than three sleepless nights.
The framework is not “buy the cheapest” and it is not “buy the best.” It is: buy the unit where the price gap is smaller than the value gap, and walk away from every unit where it is not.
Price per square foot is not the same as return
There is a reflex in new-launch buying that says take the biggest unit the loan will support. It survives because it sounds prudent, and it costs people money because return is measured against the cheque you wrote, not against the floor area you received.
A two-bedroom that matched a three-bedroom on profit
Unit
Entry
Profit
Return
3BR + utility · 1,076 sqft
$1.634M
~$276K
17%
2BR · 753 sqft
$1.143M
~$280K
25%+
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Two units in the same development over comparable hold periods.
3BR + utility · 1,076 sqft
17%
2BR · 753 sqft
25%+
Nearly identical dollar profit from a cheque that was $491,000 smaller. The smaller unit did not outperform because two-bedrooms are inherently better investments; it outperformed because its quantum sat in the deepest part of the resale buyer pool, and because the capital not committed to it remained available.
Quantum discipline matters more in 2026 than it did in the cheaper years, because the entry price of a new launch now varies enormously by region and the psf headline hides it.
Indicative new-launch pricing by market segment, 2026
Segment
Indicative range
What it means for quantum
Core Central Region
$3,000 – $5,000+ psf
A 1,000 sqft unit starts around $3M and rises quickly
Rest of Central Region
$2,400 – $3,200 psf
The band where most recent launch supply sits
Outside Central Region
$1,900 – $2,500 psf
Over half the 2026 launch pipeline is here
Executive condominium
$1,300 – $1,600 psf
Lowest entry, with eligibility and resale restrictions
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Indicative 2026 new-launch price ranges. Actual pricing varies materially by project, tenure and unit type.
Read that against where the launches actually are. Roughly seventeen launch-ready projects are expected across 2026 and more than half of them sit outside the central region, which means the majority of buyers this year are choosing stacks inside large suburban developments — exactly the conditions where homogeneity is highest and stack selection matters most.
When the right answer is a different layout entirely
Sometimes the best available stack in your target layout is genuinely poor: it faces the car park, or it is in the 85% bucket, or the good stacks sold on day one. The instinct at that point is to settle for the least bad version of what you came for. The discipline is to move one layout up or one layout down and re-run the ranking there.
The smaller three-bedroom that beat the larger one
Unit
Entry
Exit
Profit
Return
3BR + utility · 1,076 sqft
$1.484M
$1.800M
$316K
21%
3BR · 936 sqft
$1.381M
$1.900M
$519K
38%
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Two three-bedroom layouts in one development over the same hold period.
3BR + utility · 1,076 sqft
21%
3BR · 936 sqft
38%
On paper the smaller unit was the lesser product — no utility space, 140 fewer square feet, a layout the sales team would have described as the compromise option. It exited $100,000 higher and returned 64% more appreciation over the same period, because it was the scarcer configuration in the development and because its quantum let a future buyer treat it as the affordable way into the project.
Switch, or do not switch
Switch when
Do not switch when
Your target layout’s best stack still scores badly on landmines or homogeneity
You are giving up space your household actually needs to live in
An adjacent layout has a materially better stack at a smaller cheque
The cheaper layout is itself the high-homogeneity bucket
The adjacent layout is the scarcer product in the development
The switch is a rationalisation for buying the cheapest unit available
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The switch is a stack decision that happens to change layout — not a budget decision that happens to change stack.
The right-hand column is the honest half. Switching down is a real strategy and it is also the most common way people talk themselves into a unit that does not fit their life. If the reason you are switching is that the good stack in the smaller layout is genuinely better, switch. If the reason is that it is cheaper, you are not applying a framework, you are shopping.
The 2026 conditions this has to survive
A framework is only as good as the market it has to work in, and the 2026 market has two features that bear directly on stack selection: the resale channel is where most transactions are actually happening, and unsold inventory is falling.
Private home transactions by channel, 2026
Units, excluding executive condominiums
New saleResale
URA quarterly real estate statistics, 1Q2026 and 2Q2026.
In the first quarter of 2026, resale accounted for 59.6% of all private home sales; in the second quarter resale volume rose again to 3,813 units against 2,141 new sales. That is the channel your unit will eventually be sold through, and it is a channel where your listing sits alongside every comparable unit in the building at once. Everything in this guide is ultimately an argument about how your unit reads in that comparison.
Supply and vacancy going into the second half of 2026
Measure
Reading
Unsold uncompleted units (ex-EC), 2Q2026
14,929 — down 7.2% on the quarter
Unsold units with planning approval, 1Q2026
17,032
Pipeline expected to complete in coming years
about 55,800 units
Overall vacancy rate, 1Q2026
6.2%
Vacancy — CCR / RCR / OCR
8.2% / 6.3% / 5.2%
Launch-ready projects expected in 2026
about 17, over half of them OCR
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URA quarterly statistics and published 2026 launch pipelines.
Falling unsold inventory is generally read as a positive, and for the market as a whole it is. For a stack decision it cuts the other way: a shrinking pool of unsold units means the good stacks in the good projects go earlier, and the units still available late in a launch are disproportionately the ones somebody else already ranked and rejected. If you arrive at a project in its ninth month, run the ranking anyway — but expect the answer to be that the remaining inventory is the bucket, not the exception.
One timing rule has also changed. The seller’s stamp duty holding period was extended to four years in July 2025, which lengthens the minimum realistic hold on any unit bought now. A longer forced hold makes differentiation more valuable, not less: you are committing to be in the market on somebody else’s schedule, and the unit that is easiest to distinguish is the one that gives you the most control over when you leave.
The showflat checklist
Bring this. Do not put down a cheque until every line has an answer — not an impression, an answer.
Before you commit
Check
What “done” looks like
Located the 4BR and 5BR stacks
You can say which towers the developer’s own team ranked first, and why
Ranked every stack in your layout
A written best-to-worst list made before you saw the price list
Compared your ranking to theirs
Every disagreement identified and investigated individually
Measured homogeneity
You know what share of your unit type shares your facing and layout
Identified your differentiator
If that share is above roughly 70%, you can name what makes yours different
Read the neighbours’ site plans
You know what each shortlisted stack actually sees, not its compass direction
Mapped the service infrastructure
Every bin chute, substation, compactor and pumping room located on the plan
Viewed the 3D site model
Retaining walls, level changes and view obstructions checked in three dimensions
Checked privacy sightlines
Car parks, gyms, opposite blocks and elevated walkways all cleared
Pulled Master Plan zoning
Every vacant plot your unit faces has a known zoning and plot ratio
Applied the two thresholds
Any premium you are paying is under 1.5%; any discount you are taking is over 9%
Tested one layout up and one down
Both adjacent layouts ranked before you locked in
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Twelve checks. On a large launch, running them properly takes an afternoon and a second viewing.
Test your own pair
Your shortlist, not the theory
Is that stack premium worth paying?
Enter the two stacks you are actually deciding between. The calculator prices the gap against the 1.5% and 9% thresholds, converts it into floors of ordinary height at market rates, and tells you what either stack would have to cost for the decision to become clean.
Premium on the better stack
—
—
Premium in dollars—
Equivalent floors of height at market rates—
Discount on the weaker stack—
Price the weaker stack needs for a 9% discount—
Most the better stack can cost inside 1.5%—
Homogeneity read—
Illustrative landmine drag on the weaker stack—
Premium as a share of one floor’s market increment for this unit type: —
—
Indicative only, and a guide rather than financial or investment advice. The 1.5% and 9% thresholds are decision heuristics, not valuations. The floors-equivalent figure uses average market price steps per floor by unit type ($3,288 for a one-bedroom, $6,910 for a two-bedroom, $9,398 for a three-bedroom, $12,608 for a four-bedroom) and is a benchmark, not a price for your building. The landmine drag is an illustrative model assuming 5% of entry price forgone per identified landmine at exit; it is a planning assumption only, derived loosely from documented cases, and actual outcomes vary widely and can be far larger, far smaller, or zero. Nothing here forecasts a return.
What the evidence actually supports
The biggest variance is inside the project. Forty sub-sales in one 2025-completed development, every one profitable, and a $749,000 gap between the smallest and largest gain. The market did not create that spread. The price list did.
Height is priced at launch and discounted at resale. An average launch premium of about $6,400 per floor became an average resale effect of about −$9,400, with low floors out-returning high floors in fifteen of twenty-five projects studied.
Differentiation is the hedge, and 2026 needs it. Non-landed prices were flat to negative in 2Q2026 and fell 1.2% in the Rest of Central Region. When the index is not carrying you, being one of two hundred identical listings is the whole problem.
Landmines cost you at the exit, not the entry. One documented pair, seven floors apart in the same stack, differed by $211,000 in profit over a retaining wall that appeared on the 3D model and on no floor plan.
The thresholds do the arguing for you. Under 1.5% to pay up, over 9% to take the discount, nothing in between. Applied honestly, the rule eliminates more units than it selects — which is the point.
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Your shortlist, your stacks, your numbers
Get a stack-level read before you commit.
A run through the specific project you are evaluating: stack-by-stack ranking for your target layout, a landmine review against the actual site plan and 3D model, a check of the current price list for batch mispricings, and what the exit looks like against current resale and sub-sale data in that development. No obligation — you will leave with a clear next step either way.
About the figuresQuarterly price indices, transaction volumes by channel, unsold inventory, the supply pipeline and vacancy rates are from URA’s quarterly real estate statistics for 1Q2026 and 2Q2026 and from published market commentary on those releases. Sub-sale profitability for projects completed in 2025, including the forty-transaction development discussed in the opening section, is compiled from caveat-based analysis of 2025 completions. Average price steps per floor by unit type, by district and by project age, and the launch-versus-resale floor-premium comparison across twenty-five projects launched 2018–2020, are from published analysis of Singapore condominium transaction data. Indicative new-launch price ranges by district and segment and the 2026 launch pipeline are from published 2026 launch guides. The documented unit pairs — the landed-view and pool-facing pair, the retaining-wall pair, the two-bedroom and three-bedroom comparison and the layout-switch pair — are individual transactions and are presented as documented cases, not as representative averages; no project or party is identified. The 1.5% and 9% thresholds, the landmine drag assumption in the calculator and the floors-equivalent conversion are illustrative decision models compiled by mastREplan on the stated assumptions; they are not forecasts, valuations or projections of returns, and actual outcomes vary widely and can be negative. Rules and rates, including the seller’s stamp duty holding period, are stated as at publication and are subject to change. Nothing here is financial advice — please check with a qualified professional before making any property decision. See our full Disclaimer.
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