Buying at launch beat buying later in 41 of 48 developments

A new launch sells for years. The first units go at preview prices, and the developer keeps selling into the following year, and the year after that. If you missed the launch weekend, the same building is still available.

So does it matter when you buy?

We compared buyers inside the same development: some who bought in the launch year, some who bought later, all holding roughly four years before selling. Across 48 projects where both groups exist, the launch buyers came out ahead in 41 of them. The median difference was 13 percentage points of gain.

Key takeaways

• Within the same building, launch-year buyers gained a median 18.06% over four years. Buyers who came later gained 6.94%. The comparison
• Launch buyers won in 41 of 48 projects. This is not a difference of averages across a market; it is the same comparison run 48 times inside 48 separate buildings. Project by project
• The mechanism is entry price. Later buyers paid 8% to 24% more per square foot for the same development. What waiting cost
• Waiting even one year cost a median 10.6 points of gain, in 19 of the 20 projects where we can measure it. How long a wait matters
• On return to capital, which accounts for the staged payments and the rent each buyer could collect, launch still wins at every mortgage rate. Return on capital

Same building, different entry

The problem with most timing comparisons is that they compare different properties. A launch in one district against a resale in another tells you about districts as much as timing.

Here every comparison happens inside one development. Same building, same location, same tenure, same age, same completion date. The only difference is when the buyer signed.

Every pair is a shoebox unit bought from the developer or on the open market, held between 3.5 and 4.5 years, then resold. That window is deliberate: seller's stamp duty applies for the first three years, so four years is when an investor who bought to sell can actually sell.

	Launch-year buyers	Later buyers
Projects	48	48
Pairs	154	136
Median entry	$1,299 psf	$1,496 psf
Median gain over four years	18.06%	6.94%

Median holding periods are 4.17 and 4.05 years, so this is not a duration effect.

Project by project

A difference of two medians can hide a lot. If a handful of projects drove the whole gap, the finding would be much weaker than it looks.

They did not. Taking each of the 48 projects separately and comparing its launch buyers against its later buyers:

• Launch buyers gained more in 41 projects. Later buyers gained more in 7.
• The median within-project difference was 13.18 percentage points.

The seven exceptions are thin rather than contrary. They average 1.6 later-buyer pairs each, against 3.0 in the projects where launch won, so most are a single later transaction landing above a median, which is noise rather than a countervailing pattern.

That 41-of-48 figure is what makes this worth publishing. It is not one comparison that came out a particular way. It is the same comparison, repeated inside 48 different buildings, coming out the same way in 85% of them.

What waiting cost

The mechanism is not mysterious. Later buyers paid more for the same building.

Bought after launch	Projects	Extra paid per sqft	Gain given up
1 year	20	+8.0%	10.64 points
2 years	12	+7.7%	13.80 points
3 years	7	+24.3%	26.65 points
4 years	21	+16.1%	9.93 points

Compared against launch-year buyers in the same development.

A developer raising prices through a sales campaign is doing exactly what a developer should do. Early buyers take on more uncertainty (the building does not exist, the neighbourhood may change, the market may turn) and they are compensated for it in the price. Later buyers pay for the certainty of seeing more of the picture.

What this shows is the size of that trade over a four-year hold. On these projects, the certainty cost between 8% and 24% of the entry price, and most of the subsequent gain.

How long a wait matters

The one-year row is the strongest evidence in the table, and the most useful.

Twenty projects had both launch-year buyers and buyers who came a year later. In 19 of the 20, the launch buyer did better. The median gap was 10.64 points, on an entry price only 8% higher.

That is a decision a real buyer faces. Not "should I have bought in 2018 instead of 2021," which nobody can act on, but "the launch was last year and the same stack is still selling, does it matter?" On this evidence, in this size band, over this holding period, it did.

The three-year row should be read with more caution: 7 projects and 8 pairs is too thin to carry weight on its own. We have left it in because removing inconvenient thin cells is how tables start lying, but it is not evidence of much.

Return on capital

A gain figure is not a return, and here the two buyers are doing genuinely different things with their money.

A launch buyer pays 5% at booking and the rest in stages across three years of construction, and cannot rent the unit out until it is built. A buyer arriving three years later walks into a nearly finished project, pays the overdue stages at once, and can rent it out almost immediately. One commits less money for less time; the other collects far more rent.

Both effects are real and they pull in opposite directions. Modelling each properly gives a return on the cash actually invested:

Bought	Net rent collected	Total cash in	Return at 2.5%
Launch year	$22,496	$179,914	10.53%
1 year later	$47,038	$197,212	6.21%
2 years later	$71,580	$193,880	7.00%
3 years later	$96,121	$215,572	2.37%
4 years later	$96,121	$205,413	5.91%

The later buyer collects up to four times the rent. It is not enough. The entry premium is larger in absolute terms, and the later buyer also commits more cash overall while carrying a fully drawn mortgage for most of the hold.

Across the rate range:

Bought	1.5%	2.5%	3.5%	4.5%
Launch year	11.38%	10.53%	9.67%	8.81%
1 year later	8.11%	6.21%	4.31%	2.42%
2 years later	9.38%	7.00%	4.60%	2.20%
3 years later	4.78%	2.37%	−0.12%	−2.70%
4 years later	8.21%	5.91%	3.56%	1.19%

Launch leads at every rate, and the gap widens as borrowing gets more expensive: 2.6 points at 1.5%, 6.4 points at 4.5% against the one-year buyer. A staged purchase is not carrying a full loan through the construction years; a later purchase is.

Worth noting the two measures agree. On gross gain the launch advantage was 13 percentage points over four years. On return to capital it is 4.3 points a year at 2.5%. Different magnitudes, same direction, which is the outcome you want when a gross figure and a modelled one are asked the same question.

The assumptions behind those returns

Only the entry price and the gain are measured. Everything in the return tables is ours, and the result moves with it.

Financing. 75% loan, 30-year amortising, at a flat rate. Four rates shown because the answer depends on it.

Payment schedule. The standard progressive scheme with completion three years after launch. A buyer entering later pays the stages already due at the point of entry and the remainder on schedule, which is how a mid-construction purchase actually works. This assumption carries real weight for the three and four-year buyers, who under it front-load almost the whole price.

Rent. Suburban shoebox medians on 474 sqft, from two months after completion, net of maintenance at $280 a month, upkeep at $1,200 a year, property tax at $2,400 a year, agent fees at half a month's rent a year with GST, and 3% vacancy.

Costs. Buyer's stamp duty at the published schedule, agent commission at 2% plus GST at 9%, legal fees $3,000 each side. No seller's stamp duty, since every hold exceeds three years.

Not modelled. Additional buyer's stamp duty, which applies to most investment purchases and would reduce every row. Income tax on rent, which reduces the later buyers more since they collect more of it.

What this does not tell you

• Anything about the units. A launch buyer chooses from the whole stack; a later buyer takes what is left. Some of this gap may be unit quality (floor, facing, layout) rather than timing alone. The transaction record cannot separate those.
• What happened after four years. Every pair here sold at roughly four years. A longer hold may narrow the gap as the entry premium amortises over more time.
• Whether the return model is right for your case. The payment schedule for a mid-construction purchase is assumed, not recorded. A buyer entering at a different build stage than we assume would see different numbers.
• Whether it still holds. These projects launched around 2012 on median. Sales campaigns, price escalation practices and the rate environment have all changed since.
• Your project. 48 developments, medians throughout. A specific launch can and does behave differently.

Method

Pairs are matched from URA caveat data on unit identity, so the purchase and sale are the same unit. Shoebox is 400 to 538 sqft, the upper bound being URA's 50 square metre threshold.

A project's launch date is the earliest new-sale caveat recorded for it. Years after launch is the whole number of years between that date and the purchase; launch-year buyers are those in year zero, later buyers are years one to four.

Holding periods are restricted to 3.5 to 4.5 years. Sales recorded as sub-sales are excluded, so every pair is a completed transfer rather than a contract assignment.

Within-project comparison takes the median gain of each group inside each project, then compares them project by project, and reports the median of those differences. Only projects containing both groups are counted. This is the same within-development method we use for the shoebox price premium, applied to entry timing rather than unit size.

One difference from our other repeat-sales work: this cut uses the full transaction history rather than restricting to sales completing from 2020 onward. That restriction exists elsewhere so the figures describe the current market. Here it would delete every project whose launch-year buyers completed their round trip before 2020, which is 35 of the 48 developments in this comparison, and the question is structural rather than current.

Sale data to 4 August 2026.