Looks like the slump is OVER: Australian house prices enjoy biggest surge in more than TWO years with Sydney and Melbourne recovering
- CoreLogic data showed biggest national rise in home prices since March 2017
- Median house prices rose 1.9 per cent in September in Sydney and Melbourne
- Prices are still way off the peaks reached two years ago, giving buyers hope
Australian property prices have enjoyed the biggest surge in more than two years following a record slump.
Median values in Sydney and Melbourne rose by 1.9 per cent in September alone, rising for the fourth month in a row, real estate data group CoreLogic has revealed.
The increases in Australia’s biggest cities helped the national market, with prices climbing by the steepest monthly pace since March 2017.
Australian property prices have enjoyed the biggest surge in more than two years following a record slump. Median values in Sydney rose by 1.9 per cent in September (pictured is a waterview house at Seaforth on the city’s northern beaches)
CoreLogic’s head of research Tim Lawless said real estate values were still yet to recover to the peaks of two years ago.
‘Buyers still have some time to take advantage of improving housing affordability before values return to record highs,’ he said.
To put that into perspective, Sydney’s median house price of $900,017 is still 14 per cent or almost $150,000 below the peak of July 2017.
They are also still 5.1 per cent lower than where they were a year ago.
Sydney values bottomed in mid-2019, with prices falling by a record 17.4 per cent.
Melbourne’s median house price of $729,052 is 12.4 per cent or $104,000 below the all-time high reached in November 2017, with prices down 5.9 per cent over the year.
Metropolitan Melbourne, however, no longer features on the CoreLogic list of Australia’s 10 worst suburban housing markets.
Melbourne’s median house price also rose by 1.9 per cent in September with metropolitan areas of the city no longer among Australia’s worst performing suburban housing markets
Sydney, however, has one entry. The city’s inner-south west – taking in Lakemba and Campsie – was 9.2 per cent weaker during the past year, making it Australia’s fifth worst performing metropolitan housing market.
The Central Coast, a one-hour drive north of Sydney, was also on that list, with real estate values falling by an annual pace of nine per cent.
Median prices in the Mornington Peninsula, south-east of Melbourne, have fallen by 8.8 per cent while Darwin’s house and apartment values together have dived by 9.5 per cent.
Houses in the Northern Territory capital did even worse falling at a year-on-year rate of 11.3 per cent.
Perth took out five places on the list of shame, with its median house price falling by an annual pace of nine per cent.
The satellite city of Mandurah had the dubious distinction of being Australia’s worst performing urban housing market with prices down 11.6 per cent during the past year.
The opposite is occurring in Hobart, Australia’s strongest region, with median house prices rising by 3.3 per cent during the year.
September, however, wasn’t such a good month with values slipping by 0.5 per cent in the Tasmanian capital.
Last month, median house prices also fell in Adelaide (down 0.1 per cent) and Darwin (down 0.6 per cent).
Apart from Sydney and Melbourne, they also rose in Brisbane (up 0.2 per cent) and Canberra (up one per cent).