House Price Comparison Across Major Australian Cities

At the end of 2019, a well-known Australian property website released forecasts for house prices across the major cities. At the time, the entire property market was in very good shape. As a result, all the cities were predicted to see very strong capital growth in 2020 and 2021.

However, once 2020 arrived, the pandemic left the Australian property market relatively soft throughout the first half of the year. The bar chart below compares the median prices of each state, which differs from the earlier table of capital-city prices — median prices in the capital cities tend to be somewhat higher than those of their respective states. These figures are calculated based on the properties sold during the period, so they cannot fully represent the overall state of the market.

In June this year, the government introduced a series of grant schemes, along with the stimulus of the central bank's interest rate cuts. The second half of the year saw the property market heat up. According to the Australian property price analysis report just released on 30 November 2020, we can see that most cities recorded some modest growth over the past year, with Brisbane standing out in particular — achieving a year-on-year increase of 3.2%.