We’re Planning To Retire In Johor: Should We Replace Our $3M Singapore Home With A $1.5M Condo?

Hi Stacked, 

My wife and I will be 70 years old next year, and we are evaluating our future housing plans. I’ve been retired for the past six years, while my wife is gradually winding down her career. She hopes to retire by 2028.

Our goal is to simplify our lifestyle while unlocking some capital for retirement. Here’s what we currently own:

• A leasehold terrace house in Limau Rise, where we live now. We’ve seen similar properties in this area recently transact for around $3 million.
• A fully paid-up freehold bungalow in Johor Bahru that is currently worth about RM3 million (approximately, S$900,000 at time of writing).

We had planned to move into the JB house when the RTS is completed next year. This would actually shorten my wife’s commute to her workplace in Woodlands.

At the same time, we’ve also bought a four-room resale HDB flat for our son. We intend to use the proceeds from selling our Limau Rise house to fund that purchase. He will live there with my sister and our helper, while we also keep a room for ourselves whenever we’re in Singapore. We’d still like a base here for our healthcare needs and to stay close to family and friends.

But we can’t agree on what comes next. My wife believes that we should also buy a two-bedroom freehold condo, with a budget of less than $1.5 million, in order to have our own place in Singapore. This would also act as a long-term wealth preservation asset that can eventually be passed on to our son.

However, I wonder if that’s an unnecessary expense. Since he will already inherit our assets, I’m not convinced we need another property when we already have somewhere to stay in Singapore.

1. Should we sell our Limau Rise terrace house sooner rather than later? Will the negative impact of lease decay become a significant issue over the next five years?
2. Looking ahead, would it make more sense to sell the JB bungalow in two to three years time? This would free ourselves from the upkeep of two homes, and simply use the proceeds to rent accommodation whenever we travel or spend time around the region?

We’d really appreciate your perspective.

(This is part of an ongoing series where we answer reader questions about the property market. If you have one of your own, send it to stories@stackedhomes.com.)

Hi and thanks for writing to us!

When it comes to long-term property planning, most of us tend to assume that first-time buyers face the most uncertainty when stepping into the market. But we often overlook the fact that it’s just as true for those in, or approaching, retirement. Even in our golden years, it’s still a new phase of life that is fraught with uncertainty.

Unfortunately, seniors face the added pressure that they have less leeway to make mistakes. With a shorter time horizon at this stage of your property planning, there’s less time to recover if you make significant financial mistakes.

Thus, we think that it’s wise to stay on the defensive side as the both of you enter this stage of your lives. The priority should be to structure your assets in a way that provides financial security, flexibility, and peace of mind in the years to come.

In our view, considerations like maximising property returns should now be secondary.

Therefore, your question is less about whether one property will outperform another, and more about striking the right balance between lifestyle, liquidity and legacy. So, look at the following points:

• Whether this is the right time to sell the Limau Rise terrace house
• Whether it is worth holding on to the bungalow in JB after the RTS opens
• Whether a two-bedroom condo would fit your retirement needs

Finally, we’ll examine other factors that go beyond straightforward financial considerations.

First, should you sell the terrace house at Limau Rise now to minimise the capital erosion from the declining tenure?

To assess the financial side of this question, we analysed how 99-year leasehold terrace houses have performed as they age. We will do this by dividing the projects into different age bands, and seeing how each age band has performed over the past decade.

We’ll use only sub sale and resale transactions, and exclude developer sales.

Based on the data that we’ve compiled, the outcome is much more insightful than we initially expected. Overall, our analysis doesn’t cleanly correspond with the prevailing assumptions.

To start, we don’t actually see clear evidence that leasehold terraces begin to lose value when they enter their 30s or 40s. In fact, homes that were around 21 to 40 years old (between 1985 and 1994 ) recorded the strongest annualised price growth of 5.13% over the past decade.

We reckon that it is attributed to the fact that the land tenure of a property is one factor contributing to its capital value. Other factors such as land size, location, condition of the property, and the surrounding supply of landed homes can overturn the negative impact of an aging property.

Where we do start to consistently see the negative impact of lease decay is when homes start to age past 50 years – meaning, homes with leases beginning in 1974 or earlier. Within this batch of landed homes, we can see that price growth considerably moderates and starts to decline.

Meanwhile for the newest homes – with leases starting between 2005 to 2014 – annualised growth is low because they started from a much higher price compared to the older homes. The higher selling price has left these properties with a much shorter runway to accumulate meaningful percentage gains.

Next, we compared the performance of properties in Limau Villas (a landed estate along Limau Rise) to the wider District 16 market, and Singapore’s residential market.

This will give us a sense of how landed, leasehold properties specific to the Limau Rise area have performed comparatively.

Average $PSF

Transaction volume

Likewise, we see only marginal indicators that the negative impact of lease decay has started to erode price growth. From 2015 to 2025, landed homes in Limau Villas recorded an annualised price growth of 5.28% – comfortably ahead of the wider 99-year leasehold terrace sub-market (4.33%), and broadly comparable to the annualised price increase of 5.93% in District 16 over the same period.

However, we need to caution that Limau Villas is a relatively small landed estate. As a result, transaction volumes are naturally low, with only one to four terrace transactions in most years. This means that accurately gauging the price trajectory can be subject to outliers and small sample size.

In any case, our takeaway is that if you do decide to sell the terrace home at Limau Rise, the decision should not be solely based on the future erosion of its capital value due to its declining lease.

You might still want to sell the property for other retirement reasons, but there’s little evidence based on what we’ve researched to suggest that the negative influence of lease decay is an urgent consideration.

Does it make sense to keep the bungalow in JB until the RTS opens?

From a lifestyle perspective, it would make sense to keep this property in JB. In addition to a shorter commute for your wife, it also allows you to experience the shorter travelling time, convenience, and reliability that the RTS has promised.

This will help you to make a more conclusive decision later on. The opening of the RTS is also not too long away, with about six months to go before the first train carrying passengers pulls out of Woodlands North or Bukit Chagar station.

We would caution any significant uplift in property prices as a result of the completion of the RTS. Firstly, since there is no precedent for a project like the RTS, it is challenging to predict how it will influence the property market in Woodlands or JB.

We also can’t predict how much of its impact has already been priced into the property prices in these two areas – Woodlands and the area around Bukit Chagar in JB – and we don’t know if there will be any meaningful change after operations begin.

But you aren’t the only property owner thinking along these lines. If it turns out that many owners are also waiting for the RTS to open before selling, there could be a spike in the number of listed properties in those two areas going up for sale in 2027. Overall, this could make it harder to secure the price you want for your JB home.

We would caution that any attempt to time the market around the RTS is therefore highly speculative. 

Our rationale for suggesting that you wait is based on several lifestyle reasons, such as getting a feel for what the future cross-border journey will be like and the likelihood of a more affordable cost of living in JB.

Would a two-bedroom freehold condo unit be a good replacement asset? 

In terms of this price comparison, let’s look at the performance of one-, two-, and three-bedroom units over the past decade.

In general, the transaction data suggests that one-bedroom units tend to reap weaker gains because the pool of potential resale buyers is small. Most buyers looking for a resale condo unit tend to be HDB upgraders with families, and they need much more space than what a usual one-bedder can provide.

Comparing the performance of two- and three-bedders, the difference is marginal. We feel this favours the conservative lower quantum of a two-bedder, given your retirement.

That said, this is a broad market comparison and it doesn’t mean every two-bedder will perform in a similar manner. Factors such as the project’s location, age of the development, and unit layout still have a significant impact on resale performance.

Since part of your intention is legacy planning, it’s also best to have a conversation with your son about which locations or layouts would be helpful to him. This is a more important consideration as opposed to discussions whether or not the property is freehold.

Our next consideration is your specification of freehold status, which can add significantly to the cost of the property.

This doesn’t always pay off. Let’s start with the performance difference between leasehold and freehold over the past decade: 

Notice that because freehold properties have higher prices, they also tend to deliver weaker percentage gains. From a gains perspective, it’s not necessarily true that freehold is always better; and there may be cases in which the freehold premium is hard to justify. 

Another consideration – which we cover in some detail here – is that most condo projects see redevelopment after 19 to 24 years. This is regardless of whether those condos are leasehold or freehold; so it’s worth asking if freehold status for your legacy is really worth the premium. 

Overall, we would advise against making tenure the deciding factor. Issues such as layout (e.g., two bathrooms versus one bathroom), location, and your child’s own preferences are much more important. 

We would also suggest you don’t rule out leasehold altogether: there may be a leasehold condo out there that meets all these requirements, without the added expense of freehold status. 

The following also shows districts where you might be able to find a two-bedder, at around a budget of $1.5 million

*The unusually low average for freehold units in District 28 is because there are very few such units here, and a correspondingly low transaction volume. Due to the limited sample size, one or two lower-priced transactions can disproportionately skew the average. It shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that freehold is cheaper than leasehold in District 28.

Here’s a quick table referencing what we’ve gone through above

Conclusion

Based on your priorities, we would lean towards selling the Limau Rise terrace first. We would seriously consider retaining the JB bungalow until after the RTS opens, and wait before deciding on purchasing a condo unit in Singapore, after you’ve had the opportunity to experience the impact on your lifestyle.

That said, this should be done without too much expectation of how the RTS might affect property prices.

As for the terrace home at Limau Rise, the data does not suggest you need to sell it with any urgency due to concerns over lease decay. The stronger reason for selling is that it no longer appears to fit the lifestyle you have in mind in the future. Unlocking the value of that property, while you still have the flexibility to make that decision, could allow you to better fund your retirement plans.

A two-bedroom condo appears to strike a sensible balance if you still intend to purchase a condo unit in Singapore. It provides an independent base that is close to family and healthcare services here, and should be within your overall affordability. But we would emphasize its location, your child’s future needs, and price over a freehold status.

Given your stage of life, we would seriously suggest that you optimise first for your own retirement, rather than your eventual estate.

If your retirement is financially secure and your housing arrangements are adequate, you will have abundant opportunities to change or even enhance your legacy later. We would be careful not to allow the goal to become skewed, into something like leaving behind the biggest property portfolio possible.

Aim to leave behind the property that will be the most useful to your beneficiaries, over the most luxurious or profitable.

Finally, we would encourage you to involve your son (or estate planner if you have one) in this discussion. Depending on your son’s own housing and family plans, the type of unit you want to leave for him will vary, and this will also influence buying decisions like location, unit layout, and cost.