One Pearl Bank vs Avenue South Residence: a data view
Two large District 3 launches a few minutes apart in Outram. One is priced like a landmark, the other like a value buy. The caveat data says the gap that actually matters is not price.
Published 2026-05-24. Source: URA caveat data (private non-landed, 3-year window to May 2026) and URA PMI Rental Median (2026 Q1) unless stated.
The consensus, and where the data disagrees
The agent pitch writes itself. One Pearl Bank is the architectural set piece, the pair of curved towers on Pearl's Hill that you can see from half of Chinatown, so naturally you pay up for it and accept a thinner yield. Avenue South Residence is the big project down the road on Silat Avenue, more units, lower headline price, the value option. Both launched in 2019, both sit in District 3 on the city fringe, both are 99-year leasehold. The story is trophy versus value.
The 2023 to 2026 caveat data supports the price half and breaks the yield half. One Pearl Bank does trade at a real and persistent premium, roughly 16% higher per square foot. But its rental premium is larger than its price premium, so the more expensive tower posts the higher gross yield, not the lower one. The assumption that you sacrifice income for the icon runs backwards here. The other difference worth weighing sits in a column most buyers skim past: how deep and how seasoned each project's secondary market is, where the raw URA labels are easy to misread.
Side-by-side headline numbers
Three years of private non-landed caveats, the same trailing window the project pages use:
| Metric | One Pearl Bank | Avenue South Residence |
|---|---|---|
| Total units | 774 | 1,074 |
| TOP | 2024 | 2023 |
| Tenure | 99-yr (2019) | 99-yr (2018) |
| 3Y caveat volume | 95 | 144 |
| Median PSF | $2,654 | $2,292 |
| Median floor area | 840 sqft | 721 sqft |
| Median quantum | $2.058M | $1.649M |
| Median rental PSF (2026 Q1) | $7.87 | $6.40 |
| Implied gross yield | 3.56% | 3.35% |
Implied gross yield is twelve times the latest URA quarterly project-median rental PSF divided by the trailing 3-year median sale PSF, before vacancy, agent fees, mortgage interest, and the BSD plus ABSD cost stack on the entry ticket. District 3 (Outram, here RCR by URA region) ran a 3-year non-landed median of $2,558 PSF across 3,341 caveats, so One Pearl Bank sits about 4% above the district and Avenue South about 10% below it.
The premium out-rents itself
Start with the price gap, because it is real and it is not a rounding error. One Pearl Bank's $2,654 PSF median sits 16% above Avenue South's $2,292. The two are not comparable tickets dressed up by branding. One sells above the District 3 median, the other sells below it, and the spread has held across the whole window rather than drifting open or shut.
The instinct is to treat that premium as a yield tax: pay more per foot, earn less in rent against it. The rental data refuses to cooperate. One Pearl Bank's 2026 Q1 median rent of $7.87 per sqft per month runs 23% ahead of Avenue South's $6.40, and on a trailing four-quarter basis the rental gap still holds near 17%. Because the rent premium is wider than the price premium, the gross yield tilts to the more expensive project: 3.56% for One Pearl Bank against 3.35% for Avenue South on the latest quarter, and roughly 3.4% versus 3.4% once you average the rent over the past year. At worst it is a tie. The pricier tower is not the income compromise it looks like.
The reason is location-specific and shows up later in the transit section. Tenants in this pocket pay up for the doorstep interchange, and One Pearl Bank has it in a way Avenue South does not. Rent is the market pricing convenience on a monthly cycle, and it is rewarding the address that sits on top of the station.
Unit mix: the two-bedder head to head
District-level medians can mislead when two projects carry different size mixes, so the cleaner read is per bedroom count. Across the trailing window:
| Type | OPB median (size) | ASR median (size) |
|---|---|---|
| 1-bed | $2,434 (527 sqft) | $2,180 (527 sqft) |
| 2-bed | $2,678 (700 sqft) | $2,292 (689 sqft) |
| 3-bed | $2,720 (1,152 sqft) | $2,311 (1,109 sqft) |
| 4-bed | $2,642 (1,432 sqft) | $2,331 (1,496 sqft) |
The premium is not a mix artefact. It holds at every bedroom count. The two-bedder comparison is the cleanest because the median sizes are almost identical (700 sqft against 689), and there One Pearl Bank clears $2,678 against Avenue South's $2,292, a 17% gap on near-matched product. Note also where each project peaks: One Pearl Bank's PSF tops out on the three-bedder, while Avenue South's rises gently with size and tops out on the four-bedder. The smaller, transit-led project rewards the investor-grade two and three-bedders; the larger project spreads its value more evenly toward family stock.
Secondary liquidity: a lifecycle gap, not a void
Split each project's 3-year volume by URA sale type and the two tapes look nothing alike at first glance. Read the labels carefully before drawing the obvious conclusion:
| Sale type | One Pearl Bank | Avenue South Residence |
|---|---|---|
| New sale | 40 ($2,772) | 0 |
| Resale | 0 | 101 ($2,282) |
| Sub sale | 55 ($2,556) | 43 ($2,299) |
One caveat on the labels. URA books an owner-to-owner sale as a resale only after the project receives its Certificate of Statutory Completion (CSC), which typically lands a year or more after TOP. Before CSC, that same owner resale is logged as a sub-sale. So "sub sale" here does not mean an uncompleted assignment; for a project past its TOP it is a completed unit changing hands between owners.
Avenue South Residence has a deep, fully cycled secondary market. All 144 of its window caveats are owner-to-owner sales: 101 booked as resales around $2,280 to $2,300, plus 43 earlier ones logged as sub-sales. The tape flips from sub-sale to resale around mid-2024, which is when its CSC was issued. With 1,074 units and a 2023 TOP, it has cycled through its launch into a predictable resale market. If you buy there and need to exit in year three, there is a real bid.
One Pearl Bank shows a zero in the resale row, but that is a labelling artefact, not an empty market. It has not reached CSC, so every secondary trade still books as a sub-sale. Those 55 sub-sales are its secondary market, and it is active: 48 of them are dated 2024 or later, after the 2024 TOP, and the cadence is rising, from 9 in 2024 to 30 in 2025 and 9 more in the first four months of 2026. The recent two-bedder caveats around $2,600 to $2,730 PSF are completed units owners are reselling, not pre-completion paper.
So the honest divergence is depth and maturity, not presence. Avenue South is a lifecycle stage ahead, with 144 owner sales already in the resale regime; One Pearl Bank has 55, younger and thinner and still booking as sub-sales. The caveats that survive are narrower than "no resale market": fewer comparable trades for a bank valuer to anchor on, and quarterly medians from 2024 on that sit on single-digit counts, so they are indicative rather than firm. The more expensive project is the less seasoned one on the secondary market, not the illiquid one.
Capital trajectory since 2022
Neither project has compounded in the flat RCR cycle of the past four years. Avenue South's quarterly median peaked early, at $2,384 PSF in 2022 Q2 when sub-sale and early resale volume was heavy, then settled into a range-bound $2,150 to $2,400 with no net trend through to a $2,180 print in 2026 Q1. It is a stable, liquid asset that has tracked sideways.
One Pearl Bank drifted up from $2,486 PSF in 2022 Q1 to a $2,787 peak in 2023 Q3, when it still had 35 caveats in a quarter, then volume collapsed as the developer slate thinned. The 2024 and 2025 quarters carry one to a handful of transactions each, and the medians swing between roughly $2,230 and $2,630 on that thin tape, landing at $2,632 in 2026 Q1. Read it as a project that has held its premium rather than one that has appreciated; the higher recent prints should not be over-interpreted on single-digit counts. At the District 3 scale, quarterly median PSF is more a mix-of-vintage indicator than a clean price-action signal for either project.
Transit: the premium has a cause
One Pearl Bank's rental premium is not mysterious once you map the stations. Our proximity dataset puts it 303m from Outram Park (East-West Line), 386m from Chinatown (North East Line), and 527m from Maxwell (Thomson-East Coast Line). Outram Park itself is a three-line interchange, so a tenant at One Pearl Bank reaches the East-West, North East, and Thomson-East Coast lines on foot in well under ten minutes. For the professional-tenant pool that drives city-fringe rents, that is close to the best transit any address in the comparison can offer, and the monthly rent is pricing it.
Avenue South Residence sits on Silat Avenue, further from the Outram Park core and closer to the Cantonment and Bukit Merah edge of the district. We do not hold a verified walking distance for it in the proximity dataset, so we will not quote a figure we cannot stand behind; what the rent data shows is a consistent discount to One Pearl Bank, which is consistent with a less transit-central position rather than a quality gap in the product itself.
The contrarian read
If an agent frames this as "pay the premium for One Pearl Bank and accept the lower yield," the data contradicts the second half outright. One Pearl Bank yields more, not less, because its rent premium (around 23% on the latest quarter) is wider than its price premium (around 16%). The trophy is also the better income asset on the numbers we can see.
The genuine trade-off is secondary-market depth against rent and transit, not prestige against yield. Avenue South Residence gives you a lower entry ticket ($1.649M median against $2.058M), a deep and fully cycled resale market, and an easy mid-hold exit. One Pearl Bank gives you a doorstep three-line interchange, a materially higher rent per foot, and a younger, thinner secondary market that still books as sub-sales until CSC, where the resale tape is real but shallow. Tenure does not separate them; both are 99-year leasehold from 2018 and 2019, so the common "which holds value on lease decay" question applies almost equally to each.
Who fits where
One Pearl Bank fits the buyer with the larger budget who is optimising for rental income and transit, intends to hold long, and is comfortable with a younger, thinner secondary market for a mid-hold exit. The two and three-bedders are the sweet spot, where the rent premium is strongest and the tenant pool deepest.
Avenue South Residence fits the buyer who wants a lower absolute quantum, values the flexibility of a deeper, fully cycled resale market, and is comfortable trading a few minutes of walk to Outram Park for a meaningfully cheaper entry. It is the more liquid, more forgiving asset if plans change.
Neither fits the buyer chasing capital growth in the short run. Both have tracked sideways since 2022 in a flat city-fringe cycle, and both clear in the mid-3% gross-yield range. These are income-and-hold decisions, not appreciation bets. Run the entry ticket through the calculator with the second-property ABSD stack before committing, because on a $2M ticket that line dominates the first-year return.
Related
- One Pearl Bank project page with the live transaction feed, rental data, and per-bedroom medians.
- Avenue South Residence project page with the live transaction feed, rental data, and per-bedroom medians.
- District 3 hub with the full project list and district-level medians.
- Mortgage and TDSR calculator with BSD, ABSD, joint-buyer IWAA, and full ROI for the typical D3 ticket.
- Save both projects to your watchlist to track new transactions, rental shifts, and pipeline changes weekly.