Shoebox units gained 24% since 2017. Family units gained 57%.

Measured across the same developments, shoebox units gained 24% between 2017 and 2025. Family-sized units gained 57%. Both figures are medians of price per square foot, which is one of four ways to measure whether prices went up, and the one most often quoted as though it measured prices. Prices did not fall. They rose more slowly, and the gap is wider than the premium figures alone suggest. The rest of what we found about shoebox units in Singapore is on the shoebox units guide.

We reported the collapse of the shoebox psf premium separately: measured inside the same development, small units used to sell at a meaningful premium per square foot over larger ones, and that premium has compressed to nothing. The obvious follow-up, and the only one that matters if you own one, is whether this means shoebox units are losing value.

They are not. They gained less.

Key takeaways

• Shoebox psf rose 24% between 2017 and 2025; family-sized psf rose 57%. Both went up. The two lines
• That gap is a drag of about three percentage points a year: close to nothing over a two-year hold, around $330,000 on a $1m entry over eight. What it costs
• Shoebox units are not becoming harder to sell: turnover relative to family-sized units has not fallen in nine years. Turnover

The two lines

Shoebox is 400–538 sqft, matching URA's 50 sqm threshold. Family-sized is 1,000–1,500 sqft. Each is measured across developments present in both the 2017–2019 and 2023–2025 windows, so each column describes the same buildings at both ends.

• Shoebox (400–538 sqft)
• Family-sized (1,000–1,500 sqft)

Year	Shoebox psf	Family psf	Gap	Developments (S / F)
2017	$1,368	$1,066	+28.3%	54 / 398
2018	$1,428	$1,156	+23.5%	70 / 379
2019	$1,435	$1,171	+22.5%	42 / 334
2020	$1,364	$1,146	+19.0%	47 / 333
2021	$1,439	$1,253	+14.8%	72 / 410
2022	$1,498	$1,361	+10.1%	59 / 351
2023	$1,647	$1,471	+11.9%	65 / 350
2024	$1,728	$1,569	+10.2%	65 / 374
2025	$1,699	$1,676	+1.4%	51 / 378

The last column shows how many separate condominium projects each median is drawn from (shoebox first, family second). In 2017, for example, the shoebox figure sits in the middle of 54 different projects, and the family figure in the middle of 398. The more projects behind a number, the more reliable it is.

Both columns climb. The right one climbs faster. The gap closes from 28.3% to 1.4%, and in 2025 the two are level.

What a three-point drag actually does

Compounded, the shoebox line grew about 2.7% a year over 2017–2025. The family line grew about 5.8%. The drag is roughly three percentage points a year.

Over two years that is close to nothing: well inside the range that the particular stack, floor and month of your transaction will swing anyway. Over eight years it compounds to about 33 percentage points of accumulated difference. On a $1,000,000 entry, that is on the order of $330,000 of value growth that a family-sized unit in the same market captured and a shoebox did not.

Whether three percentage points a year matters is a function of how long you intend to hold, and nothing else in this data speaks to that.

Are shoebox units harder to sell?

Not by volume. Counting transactions in the same developments:

Year	Shoebox	Family	Ratio
2017	406	3,910	0.10
2018	416	3,863	0.11
2019	264	2,625	0.10
2020	320	2,874	0.11
2021	628	4,986	0.13
2022	503	3,348	0.15
2023	419	2,849	0.15
2024	423	3,239	0.13
2025	389	3,128	0.12

The ratio's level carries no meaning: there are far more family-sized units than shoeboxes in this stock, so 0.10 to 0.15 reflects composition, not liquidity. Only the trend would tell you something, and it does not fall. If anything shoebox turnover rose slightly through 2021 to 2023 and has since eased back.

An important limit. Transaction counts are not days on market. They tell you how many units changed hands, not how long each took or what was conceded to close. We do not hold listing durations, so this measures turnover, not ease. A market can look steady by count and feel slow to the person waiting.

Probable drivers, none proven

Caveat data records the transaction, never the buyer. Nobody can read intent from it, including us. These are candidates to weigh, not findings:

Investor withdrawal. Additional buyer's stamp duty rose sharply in December 2021 and again in April 2023, and financing costs climbed through 2022–23. Shoebox units are disproportionately investment purchases. If that buyer thinned, the tier they concentrated in would lose its bid first. The timing fits. The mechanism is inferred, not observed.

Repricing of space. Family-sized units may be worth more per square foot than they were, for reasons unconnected to small ones: a preference shift after 2020 is the obvious candidate. Our earlier work found HDB moving the opposite way, which argues against a pure preference story without eliminating it.

Entry-price ceilings. As absolute prices rose, the buyer who once chose a shoebox on affordability grounds may in 2025 be priced toward resale HDB or further from the centre entirely. This one we have not tested.

These are not mutually exclusive, and this data cannot rank them.

What this does not tell you

• Your development. These are medians across dozens of projects. Individual projects diverge widely.
• How long a sale takes. Turnover, not duration.
• Who is buying. Not recorded, anywhere, by anyone.
• What happens next. This is history, not a forecast, and nothing here should be read as one.

Method and data notes. Data to 17 July 2026.

Private non-landed resale caveats, condominium and apartment. Executive condominiums excluded, collective sales excluded. Shoebox is 400–538 sqft, matching URA's 50 sqm threshold; family-sized is 1,000–1,500 sqft.

Each 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 each 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.

Because the two bands sit on separate panels, the gap column is a comparison across different developments rather than within a single one. Our companion article on the premium measures it inside each building, which is a stricter comparison but excludes any development that does not contain both sizes. The direction and the timing agree; the levels are not directly comparable.

2026 is excluded: the partial year leaves too few developments per cell. Data to 17 July 2026.