How price growth is usually measured, and what more data adds

The usual way to measure how much a development's prices have grown is point to point: take the price per square foot at a start date, take it at an end date, and compare the two. It is common for a good reason. It is what one person can do with the time and the data they have, and it answers the question most buyers are asking.

This note shows what that answer can depend on, and what more data adds. It is part of a series on how property is measured.

One development, sixteen answers

Riversails sold between 5 and 25 homes on resale in each quarter of 2017 and 2025. This is the median price per square foot of those resales, quarter by quarter.

Quarter	Resales	Median psf
2017 Q1	10	$981
2017 Q2	25	$971
2017 Q3	23	$982
2017 Q4	20	$1,003
2025 Q1	23	$1,427
2025 Q2	5	$1,460
2025 Q3	7	$1,488
2025 Q4	10	$1,467

Take any quarter of 2017 as the start and any quarter of 2025 as the end, and there are sixteen ways to measure the growth. The lowest, from $1,003 in the last quarter of 2017 to $1,427 in the first quarter of 2025, is 42%. The highest, from $971 in the second quarter of 2017 to $1,488 in the third quarter of 2025, is 53%. Each is a correct calculation from real sales.

The same happens at The Minton, which sold between 6 and 19 homes on resale a quarter.

Quarter	Resales	Median psf
2017 Q1	6	$1,004
2017 Q2	19	$980
2017 Q3	8	$1,011
2017 Q4	17	$1,012
2025 Q1	17	$1,560
2025 Q2	12	$1,491
2025 Q3	14	$1,520
2025 Q4	15	$1,532

There, depending on the quarters chosen, growth from 2017 to 2025 is anywhere from 47%, from $1,012 to $1,491, to 59%, from $980 to $1,560. On these two, the choice of quarters moves the answer by 11 points at Riversails and 12 at The Minton.

Why the quarters disagree: which homes sold

A quarter's median is the median of the homes that happened to sell in it. When the mix of homes changes, the median moves, even if no home's price did. D'Leedon shows it clearly. In the table below, a large home is one of 2,500 sqft or more, and each quarter shows how many of its resales were large homes.

Quarter	Large homes	Median size (sqft)	Median psf
2017 Q1	3 of 11	1,582	$1,440
2017 Q2	17 of 29	3,789	$921
2017 Q3	5 of 14	1,582	$1,485
2017 Q4	9 of 19	1,873	$1,437
2025 Q1	0 of 19	1,216	$2,047
2025 Q2	1 of 10	1,146	$2,044
2025 Q3	1 of 18	1,604	$2,073
2025 Q4	2 of 23	1,356	$2,044

In the second quarter of 2017, 17 of D'Leedon's 29 resales were large homes, and the median size was 3,789 sqft. That quarter's median fell to $921 per square foot, against $1,437 to $1,485 in the other quarters of 2017. Start from that quarter and D'Leedon's growth to 2025 is 125%, from $921 to $2,073. Start from the third quarter of 2017 and it is 38%, from $1,485 to $2,044.

A thin quarter makes an unusual mix more likely, but this one was not thin: it was D'Leedon's busiest of the eight.

More data: the whole year

Use every resale in the year instead of one quarter. Riversails sold 78 homes on resale in 2017 at a median of $981 per square foot, and 45 in 2025 at $1,462: growth of 49%. The Minton sold 50 in 2017 at $1,007, and 58 in 2025 at $1,536: growth of 53%. Each answer sits inside the range its quarters gave, and no longer depends on which quarters were picked. It still depends on which homes happened to sell in each year. At D'Leedon, 34 of the 73 homes resold in 2017 were large homes, against 4 of the 70 in 2025, so its whole-year growth of 46%, from $1,411 to $2,055, still compares two different mixes of homes.

More data: the same homes, sold twice

A repeat-sales index compares each sale with the same unit's earlier sale, so which units happened to sell cannot move it. It needs many pairs of sales, so here it is fitted across the whole private market rather than one development: condominiums and apartments, 2017 to 2025.

Earlier sale	Pairs	Growth
Resale	40,570	+40%
New home	60,350	+29%
All pairs	100,920	+33%

The new-launch effect

In most pairs the earlier purchase was made when the home was new, from the developer or as a sub-sale. Those pairs grew 11 points less than pairs that started with a resale. A new home's first price is usually set at launch, before the building is finished; its next sale is the resale of a completed, older home. So a repeat-sales figure depends on which first sales it counts, which is why the series doorway compares a median of resale prices with resale-to-resale pairs.

What is still missing

Even resale-to-resale pairs carry the ageing of each home between its two sales, cannot see a renovation done in between, and only see homes that sold twice. No method on this page removes those three.

Method and data notes

Riversails, The Minton and D'Leedon: every resale recorded in URA caveat data for the development in 2017 and 2025, collective sales excluded. The median is of each sale's own price per square foot, and quarters are calendar quarters.

How the examples were chosen. The rule was fixed before it was run: of private condominium and apartment developments with at least 5 resales in every quarter of 2017 and 2025, and a similar typical unit size across those quarters (the largest quarterly median size less than 1.35 times the smallest), the two with the most resales across the two years. That gave Riversails and The Minton. D'Leedon was chosen differently, because its second quarter of 2017 shows a change in the mix of homes sold. It does not meet the unit-size condition, and it is an illustration, not a typical case.

The repeat-sales figures cover private condominiums and apartments, with executive condominiums excluded: a repeat-sales index fitted by year, with the pairs as at 28 September 2026, split by the type of the earlier sale in each pair.

Growth figures are rounded to whole percentages. Growth printed beside two prices is computed from the prices as printed, and every gap between two figures quoted in the text is computed from the figures as printed.