A prime two-bedroom costs 64.8% more than a suburban one. Per square foot it costs 44.1% more. The gap is size.

A prime two-bedroom costs 64.8% more than a suburban one. Per square foot it costs 44.1% more.

Both numbers are true and they describe the same two homes. The difference between them is floor area, and floor area is where the regions have quietly stopped behaving the same way.

Key takeaways

• A resale two-bedroom is $2,060,000 in prime, $1,530,000 on the city fringe, $1,250,000 in the suburbs. What it costs
• The prime premium per square foot has roughly halved since 2017, from 88.4% over the suburbs to 44.1%. The premium halved
• Against the city fringe it narrowed in every one of the eight years, from 45.2% to 16.1%. Eight years, eight narrower gaps
• Prime kept its floor area while the rest shrank. A suburban resale two-bedroom lost 140 sqft to prime over the same period. Why the two premiums differ
• Prime is the only region where fewer two-bedrooms trade than in 2017. The other two are up about half. How many change hands

What a two-bedroom costs by region

Median transacted price and median price per square foot, 2025.

Region	Median price	Median psf	Median floor area
Outside Central	$1,250,000	$1,545	807 sqft
Rest of Central	$1,530,000	$1,917	786 sqft
Core Central	$2,060,000	$2,226	947 sqft

Read the last two columns together. Prime costs 44.1% more per square foot than the suburbs and comes with 140 more square feet, which is why its total price is 64.8% higher rather than 44.1% higher.

The prime premium has roughly halved

What prime costs above the suburbs, per square foot, in the resale market:

• CCR (prime)
• RCR (city fringe)
• OCR (suburban)

Over the nine years, a suburban resale square foot rose 59.3%, a city fringe one 52.4%, and a prime one 21.8%. Whatever has been pushing prices up has pushed hardest furthest from the centre.

Eight years, eight narrower gaps

• Prime over suburban
• Prime over city fringe

Prime against the city fringe narrows in all eight year-on-year steps, from 45.2% to 16.1%. That is unusual in market data and it means the two are close to converging: a square foot in a city fringe two-bedroom now costs within a sixth of a prime one.

Prime against the suburbs narrows in six of the eight steps, widening slightly in 2019 and 2021, and ends at half where it started.

How many change hands

Resale two-bedroom transactions:

Region	2017	2025	Change
Outside Central	1,284	1,963	+52.9%
Rest of Central	960	1,466	+52.7%
Core Central	801	685	-14.5%

• OCR (suburban)
• RCR (city fringe)
• CCR (prime)

All three regions move together twice. Volume falls hard in 2019, to 72% of its 2017 level in the suburbs and 64% in prime, and all three spike in 2021. What separates them is the recovery. The suburbs and the city fringe settled about half again above where they started. Prime has not been back above its 2017 level in any year except 2021, and sits 14.5% below it now.

So this is not a story about prime losing volume steadily. It is a story about prime being the one region that did not recover.

Prime is therefore the region where prices rose least and where the fewest homes change hands, and those two facts sit next to each other without us being able to say which drives which. A thinner market can hold prices up as easily as down, depending on whether it is buyers or sellers who left, and caveat records do not say which.

Why the two premiums differ

Per square foot, prime costs 44.1% more than the suburbs. In total price it costs 64.8% more. Both are correct, and the twenty point difference is floor area.

Median floor area of a resale two-bedroom:

Region	2017	2025	Change
Outside Central	947 sqft	807 sqft	-14.8%
Rest of Central	942 sqft	786 sqft	-16.6%
Core Central	969 sqft	947 sqft	-2.3%

In 2017 the three regions built much the same two-bedroom: 947, 942 and 969 square feet, a spread of 27 feet across the whole island. By 2025 prime is 140 square feet larger than the suburbs.

Prime barely moved. The other two lost about a sixth of their floor area.

So the prime buyer today pays a much smaller premium on each square foot and buys noticeably more of them. That is why the price premium fell by a quarter while the square-foot premium halved.

A note on new launches

This article is about the resale market. New launches are a different question and get their own piece, but one figure from them is worth borrowing here, because it explains where the regional size difference lives.

A new two-bedroom in 2025 has a median floor area of 678 square feet in the suburbs, on the city fringe and in prime. The same number three times. Developers now build the same two-bedroom everywhere, regardless of what the land underneath costs.

So the regional size difference above is a fact about the existing stock, not about what is being built. That sits alongside our work on shoebox units, where we found the shoebox fell out of production rather than out of favour, and that resale two-bedrooms are shrinking because the homes now reaching the resale market were built more recently and were smaller when new. This cut says that process has barely touched prime.

What this does not tell you

• Why prime lagged. We can measure that prime prices rose least and prime homes stayed largest. Transaction records do not say whether that is buyers, stamp duties, supply, or the kind of stock that happens to change hands.
• Whether the convergence continues. Eight consecutive narrower gaps against the city fringe is a strong pattern and not a forecast. At 16.1% there is not much room left.
• What any particular home is worth. These are middle values across hundreds of projects. Floor, facing, condition and the project itself matter more than the region a home sits in.
• New launches. This is the resale market. What a new two-bedroom costs by region, and how the two compare, are separate questions covered elsewhere in this series.
• Landed homes or other sizes. This covers two-bedroom private condominiums and apartments only.

Method

Figures are transacted prices from URA caveat data for private condominiums and apartments, excluding collective sales and sub-sales. Bedroom count is worked out from the unit record rather than stated in the caveat, and only transactions where it resolves are counted.

Every figure is resale unless stated. The single new launch figure, the 678 sqft median floor area, is labelled where it appears. Every year-on-year comparison is made within one market and one region. A single national figure mixes both markets and the mix has changed, so pooled comparisons across years measure a change in what sold as much as a change in price.

Regions are URA market segments: Core Central, Rest of Central, Outside Central.

Records with a floor area below 200 sqft or above 6,000 sqft are treated as corrupt and excluded. In this population there are none: every two-bedroom resale in all three regions falls inside that range, so the exclusion removes nothing and moves no figure here.

Medians are used rather than averages, so a small number of unusual transactions does not move the figures.

Sale data to 4 August 2026.