Published 28 August 2026
A two-bedroom condo now yields 3.29% gross. Its lead over a three-bedroom has more than tripled since 2017.
By Realila
In 2017 a two-bedroom condominium cost 13.2% more per square foot to buy than a three-bedroom. Today it costs 0.9% more, and in Outside Central it costs slightly less. The extra price a buyer once paid for the smaller home is effectively gone.
The extra rent a tenant pays is not. A two-bedroom still rents for 11.5% more per square foot than a three-bedroom. Tenants kept most of the second bedroom's premium. Buyers gave nearly all of it up.
That difference between what tenants kept and what buyers gave up is why the rental yield on a two-bedroom has pulled away from the yield on a three-bedroom.
Throughout this article the yardstick is the three-bedroom, because it is the two-bedroom's nearest larger size, the step up that a two-bedroom decision weighs. The one-bedroom, the nearest size down, appears in the renting-out table later in this piece, and the psf article in this series sets all four sizes side by side.
Key takeaways
- A two-bedroom rents for 11.5% more per square foot than a three-bedroom. That premium moved inside a 13.7% to 16.5% band for seven years, then fell in each of the last two. What tenants pay
- A two-bedroom cost 13.2% more per square foot to buy than a three-bedroom in 2017 and 0.9% more in 2025. In Outside Central it now costs less. What buyers pay
- A two-bedroom yields 3.29% gross against 2.89% for a three-bedroom, and the gap between those two yields has more than tripled since 2017. What that does to yield
- The collapse in what buyers pay appears in all three regions at once, so it is not one part of the island driving it. It is not one region doing it
- Two-bedrooms are rented out twice as often as three-bedrooms, and across every format we have measured, buyers repriced hardest where renting out is heaviest. The smaller the home, the harder buyers repriced it
What tenants pay
- Two-bedroom
- Three-bedroom
Median monthly rent per square foot for a two-bedroom against a three-bedroom:
| Year | Two-bedroom | Three-bedroom | Rent premium | Projects behind each median (2BR / 3BR) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | $3.20 | $2.75 | +16.4% | 983 / 1,057 |
| 2018 | $3.17 | $2.79 | +13.7% | 1,013 / 1,102 |
| 2019 | $3.15 | $2.75 | +14.7% | 1,056 / 1,145 |
| 2020 | $3.10 | $2.71 | +14.4% | 1,037 / 1,104 |
| 2021 | $3.22 | $2.81 | +14.7% | 1,046 / 1,153 |
| 2022 | $3.84 | $3.30 | +16.5% | 1,019 / 1,096 |
| 2023 | $4.70 | $4.09 | +15.0% | 1,022 / 1,117 |
| 2024 | $4.57 | $4.02 | +13.8% | 999 / 1,065 |
| 2025 | $4.58 | $4.11 | +11.5% | 1,007 / 1,070 |
The last column is how many projects went into each year's medians, two-bedroom first, three-bedroom second. A project counts in a year when it has at least three leases of that bedroom count, and it contributes its own median rather than its individual leases, so a large development cannot dominate. The counts sit in a narrow range across all nine years, so no year's figure rests on a thinner base than another. Premiums are calculated from unrounded medians and can differ slightly from the rounded rents shown.
Both rents rose steeply through the 2022 and 2023 rental surge and then flattened. The premium a tenant pays for the two-bedroom spent seven years moving inside a band from 13.7% to 16.5% with no direction. It has fallen in each of the last two years, to 13.8% and then 11.5%, and 2025 is the only reading in nine years below that seven-year band.
The recent easing is not two-bedroom rents falling. It is three-bedroom rents catching up: since the 2023 peak, the two-bedroom's rent has slipped about 2.5% while the three-bedroom's has held. Two years is too short to call a trend, and we say so rather than guess.
What buyers pay
We have shown part of this before. In the psf piece in this series we found resale prices per square foot converging across all four bedroom counts, to within $91 of each other by 2025. This section measures that convergence where a two-bedroom buyer actually feels it, against the three-bedroom, inside a fixed set of projects.
- Two-bedroom
- Three-bedroom
| Year | Two-bedroom psf | Three-bedroom psf | Price premium | Projects behind each median (2BR / 3BR) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | $1,195 | $1,056 | +13.2% | 286 / 409 |
| 2018 | $1,288 | $1,147 | +12.3% | 284 / 374 |
| 2019 | $1,275 | $1,178 | +8.3% | 230 / 349 |
| 2020 | $1,211 | $1,135 | +6.7% | 224 / 345 |
| 2021 | $1,330 | $1,237 | +7.6% | 312 / 408 |
| 2022 | $1,442 | $1,338 | +7.8% | 275 / 350 |
| 2023 | $1,524 | $1,469 | +3.7% | 265 / 359 |
| 2024 | $1,626 | $1,580 | +2.9% | 274 / 377 |
| 2025 | $1,670 | $1,655 | +0.9% | 289 / 399 |
Same construction as the rent table: the last column counts the projects behind each median, and premiums are calculated from unrounded medians. The psf article quotes a 2025 resale two-bedroom at $1,776 against the $1,670 here, and both are right: that figure pools every resale nationally to describe what sold in 2025, while this series tracks one fixed set of projects to measure change over time. A fixed panel cannot include projects too new to have traded in 2017 to 2019, and recent projects resell above the middle of the market.
Both prices rose. The three-bedroom rose much faster, 56.7% against 39.7% over the nine years, and the gap between the two closed from thirteen points to under one.
So a tenant still pays clearly more per square foot for the two-bedroom, and a buyer has all but stopped.
What that does to yield
Rent that mostly holds while relative price falls to nothing produces yield. Gross yield here is twelve months of median rent per square foot divided by median sale price per square foot, both from the same year and the same set of projects.
- Two-bedroom
- Three-bedroom
| Year | Two-bedroom yield | Three-bedroom yield | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 3.11% | 2.99% | +0.12 pt |
| 2018 | 2.87% | 2.77% | +0.10 pt |
| 2019 | 2.91% | 2.70% | +0.22 pt |
| 2020 | 3.06% | 2.72% | +0.34 pt |
| 2021 | 2.91% | 2.62% | +0.29 pt |
| 2022 | 3.20% | 2.85% | +0.35 pt |
| 2023 | 3.69% | 3.30% | +0.39 pt |
| 2024 | 3.37% | 2.98% | +0.39 pt |
| 2025 | 3.29% | 2.89% | +0.40 pt |
In 2017 the two-bedroom's yield was 0.12 of a percentage point ahead of the three-bedroom's. In 2025 it is 0.40 ahead. The gap between the two yields has more than tripled, and the two-bedroom has been ahead in every one of the nine years.
It is not one region doing it
A pattern like this can be an illusion created by geography: if two-bedrooms happen to sit in different parts of the island from three-bedrooms, a national figure measures where the homes are rather than what they cost. So we ran the same comparison inside each of URA's three market segments, in the first and last years.
| How much more a two-bedroom costs than a three-bedroom | Rent, 2017 | Rent, 2025 | Price, 2017 | Price, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Central (CCR) | +16.4% | +13.6% | +9.5% | +0.1% |
| Rest of Central (RCR) | +16.8% | +13.7% | +9.7% | +0.2% |
| Outside Central (OCR) | +16.8% | +13.3% | +6.5% | -0.8% |
The same two things happen in all three regions at once. The rent premium eases about three points and stays clearly positive. The price premium goes to zero, and in Outside Central slightly below it: a two-bedroom there now sells for a little less per square foot than a three-bedroom.
Three regions, one result. This is not a story about where two-bedrooms are. It is a story about what buyers will pay for them.
This also closes a question the psf article had to leave open. The convergence measured there pooled the whole market, and a pooled comparison can measure a change in what sold as much as a change in price. Measured here inside fixed panels and inside each region separately, the convergence between the two-bedroom and the three-bedroom holds everywhere. It is real, not a mix effect.
The smaller the home, the harder buyers repriced it
We have seen this exact shape once before, in shoebox units, and it is worth being precise about what is and is not being compared.
Shoebox is URA's size category, apartments of 50 sqm and below, and our shoebox series measures it on size bands against family-sized units of 1,000 to 1,500 sqft. This article measures a two-bedroom against a three-bedroom by bedroom count. Different yardsticks, so the numbers cannot be set side by side in one table. What can be compared is what happened in each case.
In shoebox units, the rent premium over family-sized units held near 52% for nine years while the price premium went from about 21% to below zero inside the same developments. Here, the rent premium over the three-bedroom kept most of itself while the price premium went from 13.2% to 0.9%, and below zero in Outside Central.
The one sentence that is true in every format we have measured: buyers repriced small homes far more than tenants did.
How often each size is rented out
There is one thing we can measure that runs in the same order as the repricing.
Counting new leases each year against the number of homes of that bedroom count that exist, in the same projects:
| Leases per 100 homes, 2025 | New leases signed |
|---|---|
| One-bedroom | 40.7 |
| Two-bedroom | 26.1 |
| Three-bedroom | 12.8 |
| Four-bedroom | 10.5 |
A two-bedroom is rented out about twice as often as a three-bedroom. A one-bedroom is rented out about three times as often. The ordering is the same in every year from 2021 to 2025.
This does not tell you who owns each home or why they bought it. It tells you how much of each size's stock is rented out rather than lived in by its owner, and that this rises steadily as the home gets smaller.
What we cannot explain
Two things, and we would rather name them than smooth them over.
Why the yield gap does not close. A home that rents for 11.5% more per square foot and sells for 0.9% more should attract buyers until that stops being true. It has not, for nine years, and the gap between the two yields has only widened.
We named a candidate when we wrote this up for shoebox units: additional buyer's stamp duty on a second property, which rose from 12% to 17% in December 2021 and to 20% in April 2023, is paid at purchase on the whole price regardless of what a home earns in rent afterwards. If that is what is happening, the effect should be biggest where the most buyers are buying to rent out. That is the order the data shows: the more a size is rented out, the more of its price premium it lost. So the pattern fits the explanation. Fitting is not proof. The records never show who bought a home or why, so another cause could produce the same order, and this data cannot tell those apart.
Why the rent premium eased in the last two years. Three-bedroom rents held after the 2023 peak while two-bedroom rents slipped about 2.5%. Whether that is newly completed two-bedrooms reaching the rental market, or something else, rental contracts do not say. Two years is a lean, not a trend.
What this does not tell you
- Net yield. These are gross figures. Maintenance, property tax, agent commission, vacancy and income tax all come out first, and they do not scale identically across sizes.
- Total return. Yield is one half of what an owner earns. Capital growth is the other, and there the three-bedroom has done better: up 56.7% per square foot since 2017 against 39.7% for the two-bedroom. The higher-yielding home grew less, the same trade-off we found in shoebox units.
- Who owns each home. The lease counts measure how often homes are rented out, not who owns them or what they intended when they bought.
- Your unit. Every figure is a median across hundreds of projects. Floor, facing, condition and the project itself matter more than the bedroom count alone.
- What happens next. Nine years of history, not a forecast.
Method
Sale data is URA caveat data for private condominiums and apartments, resales only: new sales, sub-sales, executive condominiums and collective sales are all excluded. Bedroom count is worked out from the unit record rather than stated in the caveat, and resolves for 94.7% to 97.8% of these resales each year; only transactions where it resolves are counted. A known class of large units carries a bedroom count that cannot be right for its floor area, disclosed in the first article in this series; medians taken across projects absorb its effect on the price series, and the lease-intensity table excludes those records by rule.
Rental data is URA's non-landed rental contracts. The bedroom count on a lease is stated in the listing and is present on 90.5% to 92.4% of contracts each year; only those are counted. URA reports rental floor area in 10 sqm bands rather than exact areas, so rent per square foot uses the midpoint of each lease's band.
A transaction is counted only when both the transaction and its project's record are live: retired project records, and any rows attached to them, are excluded from every series in this article.
Both the rent and price series run on fixed panels so that each series describes the same buildings throughout: a project qualifies when it has at least three transactions of that bedroom count in a single year of each window, 2017 to 2019 and 2023 to 2025. Within a series, a project contributes to a year when it has at least three transactions in that year, and every figure is the median across projects rather than pooled across transactions, so a development with many sales cannot dominate. Premiums are calculated from unrounded medians.
Yield is computed on the intersection of the two panels, the projects that qualify on both the rent and the sale side for that bedroom count, so that the rent and the price in the ratio describe one set of buildings rather than two. This is a tightening of the construction used in our shoebox work, where the two sides ran on their own panels; it costs between 1.3% and 4.4% of the sale panel, depending on bedroom count, and makes the ratio coherent. Because of it, the yield inputs differ very slightly from the levels shown in the rent and price tables above. Yield is gross: twelve months of median rent per square foot divided by median sale price per square foot, both from the same year. It is not a return an individual owner realises.
The regional table uses the same per-year construction within each URA market segment, without the fixed-panel requirement, and is labelled to first and last years only.
Leases per 100 homes counts each year's new leases stating a bedroom count against unit records of that count, restricted to projects where our unit records match the project's declared unit total within 5%, and excluding unit records that give more than 1,000 sqft per claimed bedroom. It is approximate by construction: the unit count is today's stock while the leases span 2021 to 2025, and the bedroom count on a lease is stated by whoever listed it.
Sale data to 4 August 2026, rental data to June 2026. 2026 is excluded from every series as incomplete.
Every number in this post is drawn from Realila Research and dated to when it was true. In Research you can change the period, compare segments, and drill into projects on the same data.
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