Articles by Tim Lawless

Adelaide has recorded its third consecutive monthly decline, with values falling 0.8% in August and 1.6% across the three winter months. For a market that spent much of the past two years as one of the country’s most consistent performers, three months of continuous falls marks a definitive change in direction. The scale of what…

Perth has now been falling for four consecutive months. August delivered a further 0.8% decline, leaving the market 3.2% below its April peak and taking $33,370 off the median dwelling value since the turn began. For a market that spent five years as the most spectacular performer in the country, that is a strange sentence…

Sydney’s August result was the steepest single month of this entire correction. Home values fell 1.8%, extending a decline that has now run six consecutive months and pushing the market 7.1% below its February record high. Across the three winter months alone, Sydney shed 4.7%. But the figure that captures how complete this has become…

Melbourne has now recorded nine consecutive months of falling values — the longest unbroken decline of any Australian capital city in this cycle. August delivered a further 1.1% fall, leaving the market 6.5% below its November cyclical high and 6.8% below the March 2022 peak. Melbourne is not correcting from a recent high — it…

Australia’s housing downturn has reached the point where the exceptions have run out. Cotality’s House Price Index fell a further 0.9% in August 2026 — the fifth consecutive month of decline — leaving national home values 3.6% below the March peak. But the number that defines this month is not the headline figure. It is…