The above transactions, i.e. selling during the Singapore market peak of 1996 and then buying again after the market crashed in 1998, entail a skill that many believe exist, but which actually does not - the ability to forecast property price movements.
It was just pure luck.
If such skills had existed, then GIC, which hired talents each paid more than $10 million p.a. (according to MM Lee) would not have sunk US$5.4 billion into New York real estate, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, just before it sank.
Here we are talking about talents of the best, and very best kind. Yet they were as blind as bats.
The only reason for the rise in your fortunes, ironically, was
Propertism - the belief that property prices will always go up in the long term, simply because paper money will eventually lose all its value!
However, you were just trading this property for that, selling here, buying there. To me, that is a waste of time.
There is no way anyone can know (except with the benefit of hindsight), which property is going up vis-a-vis which, or which country is going down vis-a-vis which.
It's like children jumping around on a rising escalator.
Since the escalator (i.e. property prices) is going up anyway, just stay still and let it move you up.
On the other hand, jumping around from one step to another (even though still going up), entails risks such as being stuck in the gap, and ending up as one of those "Straits Times forum complainers" writing letters complaining of high property prices.