How have property prices performed in each capital city?

It’s crucial information for owner-occupiers and investors alike – how much has the value of their properties changed in the last year?

Despite all the debate about houses being too expensive going on at the moment, not everyone who owns a home (or several) may be up to date concerning what’s going on with housing prices in our country as of late. So here’s the lowdown on how property prices have been performing over the last year or so.

The general trends for Australian property prices

According to the ABS, residential property prices increased on average by 3.5% over 2016, marking the weakest growth since 2013’s March quarter. In dollar terms, this means that the value of Australia’s residential property marker (comprised of 9.8 million dwellings) increased by $112.1 billion to reach a total value of $6.2 trillion.

The mean price of Australian residential properties now sits at $631,000.

Which cities performed the best?

Perth and Darwin aside, every capital city in Australia saw an increase in their property prices for the period. Melbourne fared the best with a whopping 6.9% increase, and Hobart was just behind with 6.8%. Adelaide, Sydney, and Brisbane saw the smallest increases, with a comparatively meager 3.2%, 3.2%, and 3.1% respectively.

That’s a radical change from roughly a year ago when Sydney was seeing huge increases to its property prices. However, it’s all more or less in line with most expert predictions we saw at the start of the year.

Not every major city saw an increase in its property prices. Perth and Darwin actually recorded drops of 4.0% and 7.2% respectively in their property values for the period, which means good things for housing affordability in WA and the NT.

Major cities and their respective % change to property prices

• Sydney: +3.2%
• Melbourne: +6.9%
• Brisbane: +3.1%
• Adelaide: +3.2%
• Perth: -4.0%
• Hobart: +6.8%
• Darwin: -7.2%
• Canberra: +5.5%

What does the quarter-on-quarter data tell us?

So far we’ve looked at how prices have changed in the space of a year, but what about how they’ve changed in the space of a quarter? We’ve compared the numbers on how housing prices had changed from the March Quarter to the June Quarter against how they changed from the June Quarter to the September Quarter for 2016.

As is evident once the figures are side by side, the rate at which house prices are increasing is slowing for the most part; and quite dramatically in cities like Brisbane and Canberra.

While that statement isn’t true for a handful of cities, it bears true for a majority of Australia’s major cities, which means that we may soon be seeing a decrease in property prices across the country. Only time will tell.