The shoebox premium inverted in prime first, then the city fringe. The suburbs haven't yet.

A shoebox unit in the prime districts is worth about what it was worth in 2019. The same-sized unit in the suburbs gained roughly a fifth over those six years, and a suburban family-sized unit gained more still. Where you bought has mattered more than how big.

Our earlier piece showed that shoebox units gained less than family-sized units across the private market as a whole — 18% against 41% over eight years. That was a market-wide figure. Split it by region and the gap turns out to be very unevenly distributed.

One thing to know before the tables. That earlier piece compared small and large units inside the same building. This one measures each size on its own set of buildings, because prime-district condominiums rarely contain both a 400 sqft unit and a 1,400 sqft one — requiring both would have left the prime market almost unmeasurable. Both approaches track the same phenomenon, but the numbers are not directly comparable between the two articles.

Nine years, three regions, two sizes

Median resale psf across the same developments at both ends of the period. Shoebox is 400–600 sqft, family is 1,000–1,500 sqft. The regions are URA's own market segments: CCR is the core central region, RCR the rest of central, OCR outside central.

Core Central (CCR)

Year	Shoebox	Family	Gap	Developments
2017	$1,959	$1,667	+17.5%	19 / 82
2018	$2,010	$1,858	+8.2%	17 / 66
2019	$2,079	$1,874	+10.9%	14 / 49
2020	$1,802	$1,773	+1.6%	10 / 45
2021	$1,875	$1,948	−3.7%	20 / 78
2022	$1,940	$2,115	−8.3%	16 / 53
2023	$1,991	$2,103	−5.3%	17 / 52
2024	$2,068	$2,175	−4.9%	20 / 62
2025	$2,059	$2,256	−8.8%	20 / 73

Rest of Central (RCR)

Year	Shoebox	Family	Gap	Developments
2017	$1,418	$1,188	+19.4%	39 / 126
2018	$1,495	$1,297	+15.2%	45 / 118
2019	$1,500	$1,314	+14.1%	18 / 99
2020	$1,401	$1,260	+11.2%	27 / 94
2021	$1,470	$1,382	+6.4%	43 / 123
2022	$1,519	$1,518	+0.1%	35 / 107
2023	$1,639	$1,626	+0.8%	37 / 107
2024	$1,699	$1,707	−0.5%	38 / 112
2025	$1,699	$1,810	−6.1%	29 / 113

Outside Central (OCR)

Year	Shoebox	Family	Gap	Developments
2017	$1,251	$925	+35.3%	28 / 190
2018	$1,311	$1,018	+28.7%	38 / 195
2019	$1,327	$1,045	+27.0%	31 / 186
2020	$1,270	$1,035	+22.7%	35 / 194
2021	$1,313	$1,101	+19.3%	44 / 209
2022	$1,414	$1,196	+18.2%	45 / 191
2023	$1,496	$1,321	+13.2%	42 / 191
2024	$1,573	$1,391	+13.1%	40 / 200
2025	$1,588	$1,459	+8.9%	34 / 192

The last column shows how many separate condominium projects each median is drawn from — shoebox first, family second. In 2017, for example, the CCR shoebox figure sits in the middle of 19 different projects, and the family figure in the middle of 82. The more projects behind a number, the more reliable it is.

The turning point moved outward

The gap column is the shoebox premium: how much more, per square foot, a small unit fetched than a family-sized one in the same region. Every column starts positive and every column falls. What differs is when each crossed zero.

Core Central crossed in 2021. Rest of Central crossed in 2024. Outside Central has not crossed — the premium there is still +8.9%, though it has lost three quarters of its 2017 value.

Read as a sequence, the inversion started in the most expensive districts and worked outward, arriving in the city fringe three years later and not yet reaching the suburbs. Whatever removed the shoebox premium reached prime first.

What the columns say

	Shoebox	Family
CCR	+5.1%	+35.3%
RCR	+19.8%	+52.4%
OCR	+26.9%	+57.7%

Compounded over the eight years: prime shoebox grew 0.6% a year, city-fringe shoebox 2.3%, suburban shoebox 3.0%. The family columns ran at 3.9%, 5.4% and 5.9%.

Two orderings appear, pointing the same way. Prime lagged the suburbs in both size bands. Small lagged large in all three regions. The effects compound, so the corners of the grid are a long way apart: a suburban family unit gained 57.7% while a prime shoebox gained 5.1%.

One caution on the gap column. In our earlier articles the premium was measured inside each development — small units against large ones in the same building, which holds location and quality constant. Here the two size bands sit on separate panels, so the gap is the distance between two independently measured medians across different buildings. It tracks the same phenomenon and turns in the same direction, but it is not the same measurement, and these figures should not be read against the numbers in those pieces.

The prime shoebox line

Prime shoebox psf reached $2,079 in 2019, fell through 2020, and has spent five years climbing back to $2,059 — still marginally below where it started. Over those same six years the suburban shoebox line rose 19.7% and the prime family line rose 20.4%.

That is the only cell in the table that went nowhere.

It is also the thinnest series here. Development counts run between 10 and 20 a year in the prime districts, against 18 to 45 elsewhere, and 2020 rests on ten. Read it as a direction held consistently across nine years rather than as precise to the dollar.

What might explain it

Caveat data records the transaction, not the buyer. These are candidates to weigh, not findings.

Foreign buyer duty. Additional buyer's stamp duty for foreign buyers rose to 60% in April 2023. Foreign purchases concentrate in the prime districts, and disproportionately in smaller units. If that demand thinned, the prime shoebox tier is where it would show first. The timing fits and the geography fits. We have not tested it, and this data cannot.

Investor withdrawal more broadly. The ABSD changes of December 2021 and April 2023 applied nationwide, alongside the 2022–23 rate cycle. Shoebox units are disproportionately investment purchases in every region, which fits the size gradient appearing everywhere rather than only in prime.

Entry price. Prime shoebox psf was already near $2,000 in 2017 — a level the suburban lines have still not reached. A tier that starts expensive has less room to run, whatever the demand picture.

Where the growth was. Suburban stock started cheapest and rose fastest in both bands, consistent with buyers moving outward as absolute prices climbed.

None of these are mutually exclusive, and this data cannot rank them.

What this does not tell you

• Your development. These are medians across 10 to 45 developments per cell. Individual projects diverge widely, and prime in particular is a small and varied set.
• Your unit. Floor, facing, stack, tenure and lease age all move psf within a single building.
• Who was buying. Not recorded, anywhere, by anyone.
• What happens next. This is nine years of history. It is not a forecast.

Method

Private non-landed resale caveats, condominium and apartment. Executive condominiums excluded, collective sales excluded. Market segments are URA's.

Each size band is measured on its own fixed panel — developments with at least three transactions in that band in both the 2017–2019 and 2023–2025 windows — so every column describes the same buildings at both ends. Medians are taken across developments rather than pooled across transactions, which would let the changing mix of what sold masquerade as a change in price.

One difference from the earlier piece matters. There, both size bands had to appear in the same development, which held building quality constant but excluded most of the prime market, where shoeboxes and 1,000–1,500 sqft units rarely sit in the same project. Here each band has its own panel, which reaches the whole market but means comparing the two bands within a region no longer holds building quality constant. Comparisons across regions within a single band — which is what this piece is about — are unaffected. Figures here are therefore not directly comparable with the earlier article's.

2026 is excluded throughout: the partial year leaves as few as four developments in some cells, too thin to report.

Data to 17 July 2026.