The 3-Bedders at Stirling Residences Cost More Per Sqft Than the 1-Bedders. The Data Points to One Explanation — but Cannot Prove It.

Two units in the same 40-storey building. Same address on Stirling Road. Same 99-year lease. Six-minute walk to Queenstown MRT for both. And yet the price per sqft between the cheapest and most expensive transaction at Stirling Residences between April and mid-May 2026 is $474 apart. On a typical 2-bedder of about 659 sqft, that gap translates to roughly $312,000 — for what is, on paper, the same product in the same postcode.

The obvious explanation is size compression: smaller units cost more per sqft, larger units cost less. That is how most projects work. At Stirling Residences, it does not hold.

On a typical 2-bedder at Stirling Residences (about 659 sqft), the gap between the project's cheapest and most expensive PSF works out to roughly $312,000 — for units that share the same address, the same MRT distance, and the same lease.

The data points to one explanation. But it cannot prove it.

The obvious theory fails immediately

Start with what you would expect. Smaller units compress more buyers into fewer sqft, so demand per sqft is higher, so PSF goes up as units get smaller. A 484 sqft 1-bedder should carry a higher PSF than a 659 sqft 2-bedder. A 2-bedder should beat a 972 sqft 3-bedder. And so on down to the 4-bedder at 1,346 sqft, which should sit at the bottom of the PSF range.

Here is what the 21 transactions from 1 April to 19 May 2026 actually show:

The 1-bedders, at 484 sqft, are actually sitting below the 2-bedder baseline in PSF — $23 less, not more. And the 3-bedders, at nearly twice the size of the 1-bedders, are the highest-PSF tier in the project at $2,617. The 4-bedders then compress back down to $2,557.

This breaks the monotonic size-compression rule. PSF does not fall as units get larger. It dips at the 1-bedder, rises through the 2-bedder, peaks at the 3-bedder, and falls again at the 4-bedder. The standard explanation — buy small, pay more per sqft — does not survive contact with this data.

The next question is whether this is a Stirling-specific quirk or something happening across RCR projects in general.

The 3-bedder premium is not an RCR pattern

If 3-bedders commanding higher PSF than 2-bedders were a broad RCR phenomenon, you would expect to see the same relationship at other RCR projects with similar profiles. The two closest comparables — both RCR, both 99-year leasehold, both completed in 2022 — tell a different story.

At Parc Esta — same region, same tenure, same completion year — the relationship inverts entirely. The 3-bedders transact $82 below the 2-bedders in PSF. The premium that appears at Stirling disappears and reverses at Parc Esta. Avenue South Residence shows a modest 3-bedder premium of $174 above its 2-bedder baseline, but that is meaningfully below Stirling's $244 gap — and Avenue South sits roughly 26 minutes on foot from Tiong Bahru MRT, a transit disadvantage that may itself be suppressing its overall PSF ceiling.

The comparison makes one thing clear: there is no market-wide RCR reason for 3-bedders to outprice 2-bedders on a per-sqft basis. Whatever is driving the inversion at Stirling is specific to Stirling. That narrows the candidates to two: something about the 3-bedder product itself, or something about which floors those 4 transactions happened on.

The floor hypothesis: plausible but unverifiable

Stirling Residences is a high-rise of roughly 40 storeys. In Singapore leasehold high-rises, floor premiums of $100–$200 per sqft between low and high floors are common — sometimes more for projects with unobstructed views. If the 4 three-bedder transactions in this period happened to cluster near the top of the building, their PSF average would be pulled sharply upward relative to a more floor-diverse sample.

There is one piece of circumstantial evidence pointing in this direction. Across Stirling's full resale history of 211 transactions, the all-time PSF ceiling is $2,719. The current period's PSF ceiling is $2,711 — just $8 below the project's absolute historical high. That is consistent with the current high-PSF transactions sitting at or near the very top floors, where Stirling has essentially never been priced higher.

But row-level floor data for these 21 transactions is not available from the source. This cannot be proven. Floor is the most plausible remaining explanation — but it is inference, not evidence.

Timing is weaker still. The coverage window is 49 days. Singapore's RCR market was relatively stable across April and May 2026. There is no basis to treat a micro-timing effect as a meaningful driver here.

What the rental market adds

If the 3-bedder resale premium were purely a product of 4 transactions landing on high floors — a sampling artefact — you would not expect to see it show up in the rental market too. Rentals cover a different set of units, different tenants, and a two-year window rather than 49 days.

Across 761 rental transactions at Stirling Residences between June 2024 and April 2026, the rent PSF by bedroom type looks like this:

The pattern partly mirrors what the resale data shows. The 1-bedder leads in rent PSF at $7.78 — here the size-compression rule does hold for the smallest units. But the 3-bedders, at $7.14 rent PSF, sit above the 2-bedders at $6.92. The 4-bedders compress back to $7.04, below the 3-bedder level.

The 3-bedder rent PSF premium over the 2-bedder is smaller in rental ($0.22) than in resale ($244). But the direction is the same. Across roughly 86 three-bedder rental transactions, tenants are consistently paying more per sqft for 3-bedders than for 2-bedders at the same project.

If the 3-bedder resale premium were a fluke of 4 transactions, you would not expect 86 rental observations to mirror the same pattern.

This does not prove that floor is not a factor — it is still possible that the 3-bedder rental units also skew toward higher floors. But it does make a pure sampling artefact less plausible. Something about the 3-bedder product at Stirling — whether layout, orientation, or floor distribution — appears to command a genuine premium that both buyers and tenants are recognising.

What the data leaves open

The $474 PSF spread across Stirling Residences is real. Unit type is part of the story — the 3-bedder tier genuinely appears to sit at a premium relative to the 2-bedder baseline, and the rental data corroborates this direction. The RCR comparison confirms that this is not a market-wide phenomenon; it is specific to Stirling.

But the spread is not fully explained by unit type alone. Within the 12 two-bedder transactions, the internal PSF range is unknown — if those 12 units span, say, $200 PSF themselves, then floor is doing significant work even within a single bedroom category. And the 3-bedder finding, while corroborated by rental data, still rests on 4 resale transactions. It is directional, not conclusive.

Floor is the most likely amplifier. Stirling is a 40-plus storey building, the current PSF ceiling is within $8 of the project's all-time record, and high-floor premiums in Singapore high-rises are well established. But without row-level floor data, that remains the best hypothesis available — not a proven finding.

For anyone who owns a 2-bedder at Stirling and is wondering whether their unit sits near the $2,237 floor or the $2,711 ceiling of this project's current range: the honest answer is that the data cannot tell you without knowing your floor. The $312,000 gap between those two PSF figures is real. What determines which side of it you land on is, most likely, how high up you are — and that is a question the public transaction record does not answer.