Published 13 September 2026
A new 3 bedroom condo is 1,012 sqft and a resale one is 1,259, a difference of 247 square feet
By Realila
A new-launch three-bedroom sold between 2017 and 2025 had a median floor area of 1,012 sqft. A resale one 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. The rest of the three-bedroom picture is on the three-bedroom condo guide: what it costs, what it rents for, what it yields and how big it is.
Key takeaways
- A new three-bedroom is 1,012 sqft against a resale one's 1,259 sqft, pooled across nine years. What a three-bedroom measures
- The gap is widest in prime at 409 sqft and identical outside central and on the city fringe at 247. The gap by region
- It is U-shaped over time, compressing to 162 sqft in 2023 and recovering to 226 by 2025. How the gap moved
- Resale three-bedrooms have shrunk in all three regions, by five and a half to seven square metres over nine years. The resale stock is getting smaller
What a three-bedroom measures
Median floor area, 2017 to 2025 pooled.
| New launch | Caveats | Resale | Caveats | 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, which is most of why it costs more in total while costing less per square foot.
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 three-bedroom is 409 sqft larger than a new CCR one, two-thirds again the gap in the other two regions. That is the older prime stock, built when layouts were larger, and it is 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 closed from 301 sqft in 2017 to 162 in 2023, then reopened to 226. It closed from both directions at once: new launches got bigger, reaching 1,087 sqft in 2023, while resales kept shrinking. Since then new launches have gone back down to 1,001 and the resale decline has continued, so the gap is widening again.
The resale stock is 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 five and a half square metres in the CCR and seven in the other two, over nine 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 one-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 one 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, and it is the region with the fewest transactions.
The resale market is a queue. What joins it each year is whatever is old enough to be resold, and that is increasingly the compact units built in the 2010s, while the large ones from the 1990s make up a smaller share of what changes hands.
What this does not tell you
- The spread. These are medians. This note does not report quartiles, or what share of three-bedrooms fall below any particular size. Half of all three-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 three-bedroom layouts vary enormously at the same floor area.
- Whether smaller is worse. A 1,000 sqft three-bedroom with an efficient layout can be more usable than an 1,150 sqft one with long corridors. Floor area is not livability.
- 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 one is not.
Method and data notes. Sale data to 1 September 2026.
Median floor area from URA caveat data for private condominiums and apartments, three-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. One 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 all-region resale decline of 86 sqft is larger than any single region's, which are 59, 75 and 75. That is not a deeper national trend. It is composition: the outside-central market, which has the smallest units, has grown as a share of all resale transactions, so the national median falls faster than any of its parts.
This note reports medians only. It does not report the spread around them or the share of three-bedrooms below any size threshold; those are a different measurement and are not published here.
Sale data to 1 September 2026.
More from Realila
- Four ways to measure whether Singapore property prices went up, and why they disagree by 18 points
Median price per square foot says private condominium prices rose 45.9% between 2017 and 2025. Hold the mix of what sold constant and it says 47.2% or 51.5%, depending on whose basket you hold constant. Repeat sales, tracking the same units sold twice, says 33.5%. Four measurements of one market over nine years, 18 percentage points apart, and composition explains barely a tenth of it.
- Buying a 2 bedroom at launch beat buying the same condo later in 128 of 228 developments, and lost in most of the OCR
For two-bedroom condominiums, the buyer who bought in the launch year beat the buyer who waited one to four years for the same building in 128 of 228 developments on gain, and in 126 of 218 on return on the money put in. The advantage is a central-region one. In the CCR and RCR the launch buyer was ahead on both measures and by 6 to 23 percentage points a year on return; in the OCR the later buyer won more developments than the launch buyer, 49 of 90.
- A resale 2 bedroom condo returned more on the money put in than a new launch in every year from 2017 to 2021
For two-bedroom condominiums bought between 2017 and 2021 and resold from 2022, a resale unit returned more on the capital committed than a new launch bought in the same year, in every one of the five years and at every interest rate tested. At 2.5%, resale returned 11% to 15% a year and new launch 5% to 9%. In the CCR, new launches returned nothing or less on the money put in. Rent from the first month, paid at once against paid progressively, is most of the difference.
Every number in this post comes from Realila Research, dated to when it was true. For now we publish research notes from the platform to answer the community's questions; the platform itself opens to the public later.
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