$9 trillion-worth of Australian homes

Posted by Luke Graham

Last week, the ABS released their most recent quarterly Residential Property Price Indexes. Given their data comes from CoreLogic (who now share a daily index), there are few surprises about the performance of real estate in our capitals and rest of state.

However, most noteworthy would have to be Sydney’s record high $1,187,500 median house price. Last year, I penned an article asking whether Sydney house prices could reach $1.5 million. I’m usually not too nervous when it comes to publishing articles, but I was a bit hot under the collar when submitting that one to Smart Property Investment magazine. Were people going to ridicule me?

A year down the road, we’re $237,500 closer to that $1.5 million figure. Admittedly, this figure has not yet reached $1.5 million, but other sources are moving in that direction. Domain’s data on weekly auctions, for example, routinely report a Sydney median for houses well above $1.5 million. Of course, this is because auctioned homes are usually well above average. But in CoreLogic’s monthly update for August, they identified a $1.3 million median house price across all sales (auctions and private treaty)—showing there has been continued movement since Q2.

https://youtu.be/iDONbRVXxlo?t=293

Continued movement since Q2 suggests that Australia is likely to have surpassed the $9 trillion mark this quarter. This means that combined, Australian homes are worth more than triple all the listed companies on the Australian Securities Exchange. Can the markets keep moving?

Well as we have discussed a number of times before, Australian real estate is not a monolith. Although virtually every part of the country is going up at the moment, they’re going up at different rates, for different reasons, and from different levels. Brisbane, for example, is the country’s number two for unit price growth over the month of August and number three for house prices. Nevertheless, Brisbane dwelling prices remain among the most affordable in proportion to the city’s household incomes.

Posted by Luke Graham, on 21st Sep 2021