A new 3 bedroom condo sold from 2017 to 2025 was roughly a fifth smaller than a resale 3 bedroom

A new-launch 3 bedroom sold between 2017 and 2025 had a median floor area of 1,012 sqft. A resale 3 bedroom measured 1,259 sqft. The difference is 247 sqft, about a quarter of the smaller home, and it is the single largest thing separating the two markets.

That gap is not fixed. It narrowed to 162 sqft in 2023 and has widened to 226 sqft by 2025.

What is in this note

• What a 3 bedroom measures: the pooled median floor area of a new-launch and a resale 3 bedroom, and the gap between them.
• The gap by region: the same comparison in prime, the RCR and outside central.
• How the gap moved: how the size difference changed each year from 2017 to 2025, and whether it narrowed because new-launch units increased in size or because resale units shrank.
• Resale 3 bedrooms are getting smaller: resale floor area by region across 9 years, and why the national figure falls faster than any region's.

What a 3 bedroom measures

Median floor area, 2017 to 2025 pooled.

	New launch	Resale	Gap
All regions	1,012 sqft (24,100)	1,259 sqft (40,422)	247 sqft

A buyer comparing a new launch against a resale is not comparing the same home. The resale is a quarter larger before anything else is considered, and that difference is most of why a new 3 bedroom costs more per square foot than a resale 3 bedroom in every region while the two can sit either side of each other on total price.

The gap by region

Region	New launch	Resale	Gap
Core central (CCR)	1,076 sqft	1,485 sqft	409 sqft
Rest of central (RCR)	1,023 sqft	1,270 sqft	247 sqft
Outside central (OCR)	980 sqft	1,227 sqft	247 sqft

Prime is the outlier. A CCR resale 3 bedroom is 409 sqft larger than a new CCR 3 bedroom, two-thirds again the gap in the other two regions. Those are older prime homes, built when layouts were larger, and they are still on the market.

The rest-of-central and outside-central figures are both 247 sqft, and so is the all-region figure. That is a coincidence of the grid rather than a finding: these medians are recorded in square metres, and all three of those gaps are exactly twenty-three of them.

How the gap moved

• New launch
• Resale

Year	New launch	Resale	Gap
2017	1,012	1,313	301
2018	1,012	1,270	258
2019	980	1,292	312
2020	980	1,270	290
2021	1,001	1,259	258
2022	1,076	1,249	173
2023	1,087	1,249	162
2024	1,023	1,238	215
2025	1,001	1,227	226

The gap narrowed from 301 sqft in 2017 to 162 in 2023, then widened to 226. Both sizes moved toward each other, though neither path was smooth: new launches fell to 980 sqft in 2019 before climbing to 1,087 by 2023, and resales fell to 1,270 by 2018, rose back to 1,292 in 2019, then continued down to 1,249. Since then new launches have gone back down to 1,001 and the resale decline has continued, so the gap is widening again.

Resale 3 bedrooms are getting smaller

Median resale floor area by region, in square feet.

• Core central (CCR)
• Rest of central (RCR)
• Outside central (OCR)

Year	CCR	RCR	OCR
2017	1,496	1,302	1,270
2018	1,507	1,270	1,238
2019	1,507	1,281	1,249
2020	1,475	1,281	1,238
2021	1,496	1,281	1,216
2022	1,507	1,270	1,216
2023	1,475	1,249	1,216
2024	1,421	1,259	1,206
2025	1,437	1,227	1,195

All three regions end lower than they began: 59 sqft in the CCR, 75 in the RCR and 75 in the OCR. That is 5.5 square metres in the CCR and 7 square metres in the other two regions, over 9 years, and the direction is consistent even though the path is not.

The steps are worth understanding before reading too much into any single year. These medians sit almost exactly on a 1-square-metre grid, because Singapore floor areas are recorded in square metres and converted. So the smallest move the data can make is about 11 sqft, and many of the year-on-year changes above are exactly that. The OCR gives back 1 square metre in 2019 and is flat twice; the RCR reverses twice, once each way. The CCR moves in the largest steps of the three regions, and it is the region with the fewest transactions.

What joins the resale market each year is whatever is old enough to be resold, and that is increasingly the compact units built in the 2010s, while the large units from the 1990s make up a smaller share of what changes hands.

What this tells you

A new-launch 3 bedroom and a resale 3 bedroom are not the same home. Pooled across 9 years a new 3 bedroom measures 1,012 sqft and a resale 3 bedroom 1,259 sqft, a difference of 247 sqft. That is roughly a fifth of the resale unit, and it comes before price, tenure, age or location enters the comparison.

The gap is widest in prime. A prime resale 3 bedroom is 1,485 sqft against 1,076 sqft for a new 3 bedroom there, a difference of 409 sqft, about two thirds more than the 247 sqft gap in the RCR and outside central. Those are old prime homes built to larger layouts, still changing hands.

For a buyer, the lesson is that this gap moves. It narrowed while the two sizes moved towards each other, and has widened since, with new-launch units shrinking faster than resale units. The table above traces the swing. Any new-launch versus resale comparison you make today is one point in that swing, not a rule.

Resale 3 bedrooms have got smaller in all three regions: 59 sqft in the CCR, 75 sqft in the RCR and 75 sqft outside central. Nationally the decline is larger than any of those: 1,313 sqft in 2017 to 1,227 sqft in 2025, a fall of 86 sqft, and the reason is composition rather than a deeper trend. Outside central has the smallest units and has grown as a share of all resale transactions, so the national median falls faster than any of its parts.

What is joining the resale market each year is whatever has aged into it, and that is increasingly the compact homes built in the 2010s. The large units from the 1990s are a shrinking share of what trades. So the resale 3 bedroom is still the larger home, and it is becoming less so each year, while the new 3 bedroom it is measured against has stopped getting bigger.

What this does not tell you

• The spread. These are medians. This note does not report quartiles, or what share of 3 bedrooms fall below any particular size. Half of all 3 bedrooms are larger than the figure quoted and half are smaller, and nothing here says by how much.
• Your own unit. A median across a region says nothing about a specific project, and 3 bedroom layouts vary enormously at the same floor area.
• Whether smaller is worse. A 1,000 sqft 3 bedroom with an efficient layout can be more usable than an 1,150 sqft one with long corridors, so floor area alone does not measure how livable a home is.
• Why the CCR moves differently. Its new-launch counts run as low as 107 caveats in a year, so single projects move it. The pooled prime figure is sound; the year-by-year figure is not.

Method and data notes. Sale data to 1 September 2026.

Median floor area from URA caveat data for private condominiums and apartments, 3 bedroom by resolved bedroom count, collective sales excluded, new sales and resales counted separately. Regional figures use the URA market segment. Floor areas outside 200 to 6,000 sqft are excluded as corrupt; on this population that removes two caveats out of 64,524.

Singapore records floor areas in square metres, and these figures are converted to square feet. A square metre is about 10.8 sqft, so the medians sit on a grid roughly 11 sqft apart and cannot move by less than that. Year-on-year changes of 11 sqft are one step, not a trend.

Floor areas are as recorded on the caveat. Singapore harmonised its gross floor area definitions for planning applications submitted from 1 June 2023, which changes how much of a development's sellable area counts toward its floor-area entitlement. For new-launch caveats from 2023 onward, the definition is known or reliably inferable for all but twelve projects, covering 683 caveats, where our records hold nothing that settles it. The resale figures are unaffected: every resale caveat in this population comes from a project whose planning permission predates the change.

The national resale decline (86 sqft) exceeds every region's individual decline; see "What this tells you" for why.

This note reports medians only. It does not report the spread around them or the share of 3 bedrooms below any size threshold; those are a different measurement and are not published here.

Sale data to 1 September 2026.

30 October 2026. This note placed homes in market segments by postal district. URA places them by planning area, which moves about one in seven private sales between regions. The figures by region here use the earlier segments and differ from what the same records give now. How regions are set: How we measure prices and sales.