Methodology
How we think about property as an investment, and exactly how the RPS and NPS scorecards work. Published in full — no price, no spin.
Methodology
How we think about property as an investment, and exactly how the RPS and NPS scorecards work. Published in full — no price, no spin.
Let's be real for a moment.
As a pure investment, property is unremarkable. Over the long run, capital appreciation doesn't reliably outpace what you could earn in equities, commodities, or other asset classes. The “property is stable” argument has holes too — if it's safety you want, government bonds and T-bills give you low risk without the baggage.
And there's a lot of baggage. The moment you buy, you're already down — stamp duties, legal fees, and assorted costs come out before the asset has done anything for you.
“But you can leverage 75% from the bank.” True. That's real, and it's something few other assets offer ordinary buyers at that scale. But it cuts both ways: that leverage comes with interest paid to the bank for years.
So if you're tallying it up purely as an investment, buying property starts to sound almost ridiculous.
There's one thing real estate does that no stock, bond, or coin ever will: it puts a roof over your head.
To us, property was never only an investment. It's about finding a home that fits your life — the right space, the right location, the amenities, the safety and security — and then letting it quietly appreciate while you actually live in it and enjoy it. You get the use of the asset and its growth. No other investment lets you do both at once.
That's how it used to work. When families bought landed homes a generation ago, most weren't running appreciation models — they wanted room for multiple generations under one roof. They bought a home, the home served them, and over the years it grew in value and helped fund their retirement. The growth was the bonus, not the point.
That's the lens we bring to every conversation: get the home right first, and let the investment take care of itself.
If you're looking for a simple buy, sell, or rent, there are cheaper alternatives. If cheap is the goal, you might even do the transaction yourself — we've put tools on this site to help you handle the basic financial planning and timeline on your own.
So who actually works with us?
That last point is the whole job, as we see it. We sit down, listen to your actual situation — your timeline, your constraints, what you're really trying to achieve — and map out the paths genuinely open to you. For each one, we lay out the trade-offs plainly: the upside, the risk, what it costs, what it locks you into. Then you decide. We're not here to push a transaction; we're here so you make the call with the full picture in front of you.
A structured way to compare resale condos on the fundamentals that drive long-term demand — not on price. Every factor, every weight, publicly disclosed.
The question “is this condo a good buy?” deserves a defensible, reproducible answer drawn from transaction data, not optimism. RPS scores what the data says about the fundamentals; it never scores PSF or asking price. You bring the price — RPS tells you how the project stacks up on what actually moves demand.
Each condo gets a 1–10 score on seven dimensions. Those scores are weighted and summed to a single 0–10 RPS score, which maps to a letter grade (S, A, B, C, D).
| Factor | Weightage | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Secondary Market | 25% | Resale price performance vs same-vintage cohort. Top quartile = 10. |
| Schools | 20% | Primary schools within 1km, weighted by P1 ballot demand. |
| Project Size | 16% | Total units. Sweet spot 500–1,000: liquid resale market, viable maintenance pool. |
| MRT (LRT-aware) | 13% | Walking distance to the nearest heavy-rail MRT. Doorstep < 200m = 10. LRT, monorail, and terminus-only stations are excluded, so a light-rail stop next door doesn't inflate the score. |
| Tenure | 10% | Freehold / 999YR = 10. 99YR scored on remaining lease. |
| Rental Yield | 10% | Gross rental yield (% per year). Absolute bands: >4.5% = 10. |
| Future Transformation | 6% | Proximity to forward-looking infrastructure — URA Master Plan 2025 transformation zones and LTA upcoming MRT stations. Closer + larger + sooner = higher score. As MRT lines open, those catalysts automatically drop from the score and the MRT factor takes over. |
Weightages sum to 100%. Final score = Σ(factor × weight) ÷ 100.
Grades are cohort-aware — a condo is ranked against its peers, not on a flat curve. Letters encode where a project sits in the distribution:
Excluded from RPS. Insufficient resale transaction history to score Secondary Market reliably. New launches are scored separately on NPS (New Project Scorecard).
Included once they have post-MOP resale history. RPS treats ECs identically to private condos — same seven factors, same weights, same grade bands. The methodology does not weight “prestige” or buyer-pool perception. ECs that outperform on measurable factors will outscore CCR condos that don't, and the framework will surface that without apology.
Condos with fewer than 20 secondary-market transactions in the trailing 5 years get a confidence flag, but are still scored. The cohort-comparison method (vs same-vintage peers) handles smaller samples better than absolute price-trend regression would.
Condos that have gone en-bloc are removed from the dataset on the next quarterly refresh, not retained as historical records. RPS scores what's transactable today.
Top-scoring 99YR condo in the dataset. Parc Life EC in Sembawang (District 27) scores 9.45/10 (S grade), ahead of every condo in District 9, 10, and 11.
Why does RPS rank an EC above every condo in the prime districts? Because the methodology doesn't weight prestige — it weights measurable outcomes. Here's the math.
Parc Life EC · D27 Sembawang · Frasers Property · TOP 2018 · 628 units · 99YR
| Factor | Weightage | Score | Contribution | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Secondary Market | 25% | 10 | 2.50 | Top 5% of 2018-era cohort. |
| Schools | 20% | 10 | 2.00 | 3 primary schools within 1km. |
| Project Size | 16% | 10 | 1.60 | 628 units — liquid resale sweet spot. |
| MRT (LRT-aware) | 13% | 7 | 0.91 | 0.63km to Sembawang MRT — short walk, not doorstep. |
| Tenure | 10% | 9 | 0.90 | 99YR with 91 years remaining. |
| Rental Yield | 10% | 10 | 1.00 | 5.12% gross yield. |
| Future Transformation | 6% | 9 | 0.54 | Within 1km of Woodlands Regional Centre (URA Master Plan 2025 zone) — strong forward-looking infrastructure tailwind from a Tier-2 transformation precinct. |
| Total | 100% | — | 9.45 | S grade |
The honest read. Parc Life scores 9.45 because six of seven factors hit 9 or 10. The only sub-9 is MRT — a 0.63km walk to Sembawang station is “short walk” territory, not doorstep. That single 7 costs the property 0.78 points; a hypothetical 10 on MRT would push it to a perfect 10.0.
The contrarian read. The Sail @ Marina Bay — widely cited as a flagship CCR purchase — scores in the C band on RPS. Marina One Residences scores C. Most of District 9 trades on prestige and PSF, not on the seven factors the framework actually measures. A buyer who pays 2-3x the PSF of Parc Life for CCR prestige is making a real estate decision, but it isn't the decision RPS scores well.
The caveat. Parc Life hit MOP in 2022. That gives roughly four years of resale transaction data — thinner than a 1990s-era condo with three decades of history. The cohort-comparison method handles this (compare Parc Life vs other 2017–2018 TOP condos, not vs all condos), but if you want a thicker dataset on the same EC story, The Visionaire EC (D27, also S grade, TOP 2018) is the #4 99YR condo and tells the same structural story.
Score your shortlist against the same framework. Graded S to D, on the fundamentals — you bring the price.
Helps new-launch buyers judge price against a realistic holding period.
New launches don't have resale history, so RPS-style scoring doesn't fit. NPS reads the launch's own transactions instead.
It compares a unit's asking PSF against what is actually transacting in that same project, by floor tier (low / mid / high) — so you're measured against the project's own pricing, not a market-wide average.
The further above the project's own transacted pricing you pay, the longer you should expect to hold before the entry premium washes out.
Too few transactions to score the project yet — NPS says so rather than inventing a number.
Flagged when sales have stalled, so a thin trickle of transactions isn't mistaken for healthy demand.
See how a new-launch quote compares to what's actually transacting in that project.
We build the things we wish existed when we were advising clients — structured ways to pressure-test a decision instead of relying on gut feel. Each one is grounded in actual transaction data, not opinion.
Scores resale condos across the demand fundamentals that drive long-term value.
Helps new-launch buyers map price against a realistic hold period.
BSD / ABSD / SSD at a glance.
Each tool has its own page with the full detail. This tab is just the map.