Top 5 Resale Condos in Potong Pasir and Macpherson. District 13 Is Fifth of 28 — and Every Project Fails the Same Factor.

District 13 — Potong Pasir, Woodleigh, Bartley, Macpherson — is not an address anyone sells hard. It holds 44 resale condominium projects, more than half of them under 50 units, and no part of it carries a prestige postcode.

Run all 2,357 scored projects through the Resale Project Scorecard and District 13 comes out at a mean of 6.61, against a national mean of 5.94. That is fifth of 28 districts, above District 3, above District 19, and 1.00 points clear of District 9 — which we scored yesterday at 5.61, nineteenth.

The interesting part is not that it wins. It is that the win and the loss are both concentrated, and they sit at opposite ends of the weighting.

It wins on the heavy factors and loses on the light one

The RPS weights seven factors. Here is District 13's mean on each against the national mean, and what each gap contributes to the district score once weighted.

The district's actual mean gap is +0.666. The weighted contributions sum to +0.669, so the decomposition reconciles to within 0.003 and nothing is hiding off-table.

District 13 places fourth of 28 on historical performance, fifth on schools and fifth on MRT proximity. Those three factors carry 58% of the scorecard between them, and the district is top-five on all three. Six of the seven factors are positive.

The one it loses is unanimous

Future transformation is the smallest weight on the scorecard, at 6%, and District 13 has the third-lowest mean in Singapore at 1.52. But the mean understates how uniform it is.

All 44 projects in District 13 score 3 or below on future transformation. Not one exception. Nationally 59.4% of projects score 3 or below; here it is 100%.

Read the rationales and the reason is the same sentence 44 times over. Every project's nearest identified catalyst is the Paya Lebar Air Base redevelopment, and for the top five it sits between 1.58 km and 3.40 km away — far enough that the scorer treats the exposure as marginal. There is no new line, no new town centre, no master plan parcel inside the district that the model can find.

That is not a defect in District 13. It is a description of it. This is a place where the infrastructure already arrived: the North East Line in 2003, the Circle Line in 2009, the Bidadari estate built out over the last decade. Almost everything the scorecard rewards under "historical performance" and "MRT proximity" in this district is the paid-off consequence of transformation that has already happened. The 1.52 is the bill for having nothing left to wait for.

Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on whether you are buying a home or an option.

1. The Woodleigh Residences — 8.85, grade S

667 units, 99-year, TOP 2023, Singapore Land. Perfect 10 on schools and 10 on project size, 9 on historical performance, 9 on MRT.

330 m from Potong Pasir MRT (NE10), with Cedar Primary 0.49 km away and three primary schools inside 1 km. Rental yield of 4.14%. Average annual capital appreciation of +3.97% puts it in the 83rd percentile of its 2023-vintage cohort. The highest-scoring project in the district, and it scores 2 on future transformation like everything else.

2. Park Colonial — 8.65, grade S

805 units, 99-year, TOP 2021, EL Development. The best MRT score in the district — a perfect 10, at 150 m from Woodleigh MRT (NE11), which is walk-out-the-door distance rather than walk-to distance.

Also 10 on schools, 9 on historical performance. Rental yield 4.46%. Average annual +3.96%, 80th percentile of its 2021 cohort.

3. 8 @ Woodleigh — 8.37, grade S

330 units, 99-year, TOP 2012, Yanlord. The only project in the district's top five with a perfect 10 on historical performance: average annual appreciation of +3.72% places it in the top 5% of all 2012-vintage projects nationally.

380 m from Woodleigh MRT, 10 on schools. Its weak point is income — rental yield of 3.30% scores 5, the middle of the range. It is the oldest of the five and has about 81 years of lease left.

4. The Tre Ver — 8.35, grade S

729 units, 99-year, TOP 2022, UOL. The income pick: rental yield of 4.57%, the strongest of the five and a 9 on that factor, plus a 10 on project size.

The trade-off is access. At 0.68 km from Woodleigh MRT it scores 7 on MRT — a short walk, not a doorstep — and its future-transformation score of 1 is the lowest in the top five. Nearest school is St Andrew's Junior at 0.56 km.

5. Bartley Ridge — 8.10, grade S

868 units, 99-year, TOP 2016, UOL. The largest project in the district, 210 m from Bartley MRT (CC12) on the Circle Line rather than the North East Line, and 0.32 km from Maris Stella High School (Primary) — the closest school in the top five.

The honest caveat is yield: 3.11% scores 4, below average, and the scorecard flags total returns as a weakness. Capital appreciation carries it — +2.91% annually, 80th percentile of its 2016 cohort.

The freehold inversion, again

District 13 is 75% freehold: 33 of its 44 projects are freehold or 999-year, 11 are 99-year leasehold. Tenure is scored, and freehold scores better on it.

The freehold projects average 6.21. The leasehold projects average 7.83.

Eight of the district's nine S grades are 99-year leasehold. Every project in the top five is leasehold. The five lowest-scoring projects in the district — E Maison (11 units), Serene View Mansion (18), R Maisons (45), Happy Mansion (24) and Braddel Regalia (11) — are all freehold, and all five are small blocks.

The mechanism is not mysterious once you see the sizes. District 13's median project is 47.5 units; 23 of 44 are under 50. Project size carries 16% of the scorecard, and a 20-unit freehold block scores badly on it for a reason that has nothing to do with tenure: thin resale turnover, no facilities, and a price history too sparse to establish a track record. The leasehold projects here are the large, recent, MRT-anchored developments on the Bidadari and Bartley land — and they win on size, schools, MRT and history by enough to overwhelm a tenure advantage worth 10%.

We made the broader version of this point in suburbs, not prime and what the freehold data actually says. District 13 is a clean local instance of it.

What the score does not measure

RPS scores outcome, not cause, and it is not a price index — a project can score 8.85 and still be expensive relative to what you would pay next door. The historical performance factor is backward-looking by construction, and a strong 2012-to-2026 record is evidence about a project's past cohort, not a forecast of its next decade.

The future transformation score deserves one specific caveat. It measures proximity to identified catalysts, so a district that scores 1.52 is being told it has no nearby pipeline — not that nothing will ever change. Paya Lebar Air Base is a genuine long-horizon catalyst and sits just outside the bands the model rewards; if that timeline shortens, the 44 scores that currently read 1 to 3 are the ones that would move.

Full methodology, all seven factors and every scored project are on the scorecard.