Economic updates

Premium suburbs led the downturn for most of the year, recording the largest price falls while affordable markets held up. Open home data tracking 13,000 inspections a week now shows that pattern starting to invert.

Sydney did not grow the fastest over the past three years. Brisbane and Perth both outpaced it comfortably. Yet Sydney is now falling further than either of them, and recent growth alone does not explain why.

The housing downturn is real and broadening, but the conditions required to produce a large national decline are considerably more demanding than the current conversation assumes. The maths is worth testing.

The Budget made established property investment less attractive. Investor lending fell immediately. The question now is what combination of rent increases and price falls would make the numbers work again.

The $5 million suburb has been almost exclusively a Sydney phenomenon for a decade. Only four suburbs outside New South Wales have ever crossed that threshold. The list is growing, and not from Sydney.

A stronger local economy, growing port activity and new investment in health and critical minerals have brought young families back to Geraldton. The city that spent a decade shrinking has spent the past five years growing.

Inflation eased in June. Fuel prices drove most of the improvement. Strip them out and the picture the Reserve Bank is watching - underlying inflation, housing costs, the labour market - has not moved.

Higher interest rates are meant to bring inflation down. They also make new housing more expensive to build. The two largest policy forces acting on housing right now are pulling against each other.

The housing downturn is now broadening across cities and price points. How far prices can fall from here depends on a variable that most of the conversation has not caught up with: the cost of building a replacement home.

The national housing story in 2026 has been one of cooling growth and cautious buyers. Darwin is running against that trend on almost every measure, and the reasons it can do so say something about where value still sits.

Ray White conducts around one in four auctions nationally. The real-time buyer data from more than 64,000 campaigns since 2022 offers an unusually clear view of how investor behaviour has responded to the Budget.

The demographic profile of a suburb shifts as the median price rises. At the top end of the market, the patterns become remarkably consistent across cities, and some of them run against common assumptions.