Cotality's October index has national home values down 1.2 per cent for the month and 6.7 per cent below their March peak. The surprise is where the pain is sharpest: Brisbane and Perth, the two cities that led the last boom, are now falling fastest.
National dwelling values fell 1.2 per cent in October, a seventh straight monthly decline that leaves the median Australian home at A$884,855, according to property data firm Cotality. That is 6.7 per cent below the March 2026 peak, a fall of roughly A$63,400 from the typical dwelling in seven months.
The headline number hides the more interesting shift underneath it. Brisbane values dropped 2.0 per cent over the month to a median of A$1,018,401, and Perth fell 1.7 per cent to A$942,018. Both cities ran hard from 2023 right up to their peaks this year, Perth in April and Brisbane in May, and both have now overtaken Sydney, down 1.6 per cent to A$1,178,959, as the fastest-falling capitals.
As Cotality's research director Tim Lawless put it, the mid-sized capitals that recorded extreme growth over the past six years “are now well and truly in a correction,” with virtually every suburb across Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide lower over the quarter.
As Cotality's research director Tim Lawless put it, the mid-sized capitals that recorded extreme growth over the past six years “are now well and truly in a correction,” with virtually every suburb across Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide lower over the quarter.
The decline is unusually quick by the measure that matters most to Cotality: the combined capital-city index has fallen 8.1 per cent in seven months, which the firm calls the fastest pace in roughly 40 years. For context, the 2022 to 2023 downturn shed 7.0 per cent over the same stretch, and the deepest correction on record, the 2017 to 2019 slide, took 8.2 per cent from peak to trough across a far longer run. On current momentum the present downturn is on track to pass it.
Why are the former leaders now at the front of the fall? Price is the simplest answer. Brisbane and Perth ran so hard that affordability ran out, and a market stretched that thin has the furthest to give back when demand cools. Buyers are scarce despite more choice. Cotality estimates sales over the past three months were 23 per cent below a year earlier, auction clearance rates are stuck below 50 per cent, and homes are taking a median 39 days to sell, the slowest since August 2020.
One caution belongs on the forty-year claim. Cotality's monthly figures are routinely revised, and often revised larger: its September reading was marked down after the fact. The rival index from realestate.com.au, powered by PropTrack, recorded a much shallower October fall of 0.3 per cent and puts values just 4.3 per cent below the peak, less than two-thirds of Cotality's drawdown. The two measures use different methods and rarely agree to the decimal, so the precise depth of this downturn depends on which index is doing the measuring.
MPJ Takeaway
The record-pace line is the one that will travel, and it is probably right, but it describes the combined capitals rather than the softer national figure, and it rests on an index that keeps revising its own falls. The direction is the solid part. The cities that led the boom are leading the retreat, and a fifth interest-rate rise in a year gives the slide no reason to stop before Christmas. We expect Brisbane and Perth to keep setting the pace of the decline into 2027. The cushion is that both ran so far for so long that a fall of this size unwinds only the past year or so of growth. Cotality puts it starkly: Perth would have to drop a fifth from its April peak to sit back at mid-2025 levels. Anyone who bought in the closing months of the boom has no such cushion.