Buying your first home is always challenging, and rising prices don’t make it any easier. Here are the median prices for a house or a unit in Australia’s capital cities right now, according to the CoreLogic RP Data Hedonic Home Value Index.
Picture: Michael Coghlan
Median prices are a better indication than averages, since high-priced outlier properties can skew average figures. These numbers are based on settled sales in the three months to the end of March.
| City | Houses | Units |
|---|---|---|
| City | Houses | Units |
| Sydney | $880,000 | $638,000 |
| Melbourne | $620,200 | $480,000 |
| Brisbane | $501,800 | $375,000 |
| Adelaide | $420,000 | $342,000 |
| Perth | $530,000 | $435,000 |
| Hobart | $359,000 | $265,000 |
| Darwin | $572,500 | $465,000 |
| Canberra | $588,000 | $409,700 |
Comments
29 responses to “What’s The Median Price For A House In Australia?”
The article doesn’t answer the question posed in its own title. I still don’t know what the median price for a house in Australia is.
$558,937.50
if my maths is correct.
No it’s not correct. You just averaged the values. This doesn’t work because 1) they’re medians not means/averages and 2) even if they were, the sizes of the underlying data sets are different .
Same with 1-o-quince below. Wrong. There are probably at least 10 times as many houses in Sydney vs Hobart, so I would expect the national average to be closer to Sydney’s price than Hobart’s. You can’t just put equal weight on every city.
I heard rumours once of areas outside of the capitals.
adult hood – 1, me – 0
Median house price: $551,250
Average house price: $558,938
Median unit price: $422,350
Average unit price: $426,213
Median price for both: $472,500
Average price for both: $492,575
But that’s only if you give equal weight to each city, which is patently absurd, and ignore all regional areas. A lot more information is needed before we can actually answer the titular question.
i don;t think i am ever going to be able to buy a house these days. will be stuck renting for rest of my life. unless i move out to the middle of nowhere.
As someone who lives in the middle of nowhere, it’s a pretty sweet gig. We’re two hours from Melbourne, two hours from the beach (if that), an hour from the snow and hour house only cost in the vicinity of $160,000 for a three bedroom house with two sheds (a workshop and a tin tool shed where we store the lawn mower) and a fairly sizeable back yard
Train ticket to Melbourne is $30 return, so it’s pretty cheap to get places.
As someone who got a high paying job right out of high school and am all but set on a career of high paying jobs and security without an ounce of debt out of uni…. I doubt I’ll be able to afford a house as well. And that is appalling.
Edit: Apparently I should have prefaced my comment with “facetious.”
I can’t see why. Unless you are spending all your money you should be saving a reasonable amount. Rough figures, $100-120k/pa, expenses of $40k/pa. That is enough for a median house deposit in Sydney in 3 years.
Then again, the entry house for most first home buyers should not be a 4br all singing all dancing (median) house – it should be something in the lower end of the market to get started. Once you are in the market it is much easier to upgrade into something better when the need arises.
The only thing it seems to me stopping you buy a property is you.
Agree with random chance. We bought our Sydney home which was a median priced unit 10 years ago and paid it off in 7 years. My wife and I were earning average incomes throughout the loan period. Admittedly, a median priced unit was about 6.5 times the average wage back then while it’s closer to 9 times now. So it’s still doable in 12 years or so.
Sounds like your problem is an inability to manage your finances.
I brought my house for $70,000 back in 1998. I got it so cheap because like 5 people got killed in it. Though with renovations over the years i’ve added 5 rooms to it and all the houses around me have been knocked down and replaced with mansions so who knows how much its worth now……..
I blame investment property buyers …
Quick, everyone move to Hobart.
Out of interest, what is the definition of Sydney? Or Melbourne, or Brisbane etc? What I mean is, are we only talking about these cities inner areas, or are we including outer suburbs, or are we including semi-rural outlying areas the residents of which still tell people they live in the adjacent city the sake of ease? For example I live about 30km out of Brisbane, in an area covered by Moreton Regional Council and I still consider myself to be from and live in Brisbane. Do these prices apply to my area? If not, where DO they apply to? So what do these statistics actually mean?
My wife and I bought our place after we got married in 2006.
It’s a strange feeling when we look at what’s going on now and realize that we couldn’t actually afford to buy our own house these days… I pity anybody else trying to break into home ownership now.
This absolutely. The median house price in Canberra is now more than $200,000 higher than the house my wife and I bought in 2008 (admittedly, the house we bought was below the median at the time, but even so…).
Unless you’re planning on moving from Sydney to Hobart, don’t get excited…
Median price based on the last X months of sales is just as bad if not worse than averages as an indication of property values.
reasons by example….
1) Take 3 sales, $200,000 $580,000 and $600,000 then the median value would be $580,000, hardly indicative of the real value of the properties sold.
2) If there are 40 properties on the market and only 10 sell it stands to reason that only the best 10 actually sold. So should I believe that the median price of the best 10 houses in a suburb is an indicator of the value of the other 30 for sale in the suburb?
3) If there are 500 properties on the market in a suburb and over the last 3 months only 1 sold, It was 10 times the size of all the others, with all the mod cons and renovated to within an inch of its life. Lets say it sold for $1.4Million. That would make the median price in that suburb $1.4Million even if every other property was a condemned 2 bedroom 1940’s fibro asbestos mansion. Hardly realistic.
I think our obsession with setting the prices of our house based on what Our neighbour got last month for a completely different house is part of the reason there is no rationality in our property market.
This should alleviate all of your concerns as the figures are not based on sales.
Be realistic… You’re not paying for a house, you’re paying for the land it’s on.
Building a house is not that expensive. Finding a spit of land to put it on that isn’t over an hour from the CBD, that’s the expensive part.
I Currently rent about 45min drive from Melbourne CBD. I work about 20min drive from the CBD but my drive to work is 45min across the south eastern suburbs. Sure I COULD buy a house or a block and build in Pakenham for cheap…. but that would double my drive to work.
And then, baby boomers have the gall to label us as the “entitled” generation because we don’t want to spend 3 hours a day getting to and from work.
New home owners shouldn’t worry about median prices. They should get over the feeling they should by a 4×2 in an affluent suburb. I live in a 3×1 in Girrawheen, which is less than 20km from the CBD, and prices are under $400k. Well under, in some circumstances.
WA isn’t comparable to Melbourne or Sydney. The flat I am renting, 30km from the city is a 2×1 and it is valued at over $400k. The flat was built in the early 80s.
You probably pay in rent what you would need to cover a $400k mortgage.
About half actually. I have been looking to buy for longer than I have been renting.
[edit] assuming I don’t want a 50 year mortgage.
I’m building a modest terrace house 100m from the beachfront.
110m2, 3beds 2bath, high ceilings, separate double garage and modest courtyard.
About 50 minutes from Perth on the train line.
For just under $350k including land of 203m2, though only 6m wide.
Lucky I guess.
Yep, looks like I’m going to die as a renter…
Housing prices are ever fluctuating so it is really hard to wait for the “right” moment to make a smart purchase. You can study market patterns and trends or get advises from a realtor, but as quickly as just a single day, the price could just jump out of a sudden without your prior knowledge.