Perth continues to be a nation-leading market, showing strong resistance to downturn pressures as it maintains high levels of sales activity and good price growth.
In contrast to trends in the biggest cities, Perth has delivered strong levels of sales volumes in recent quarters, despite all the disruption from interest rate rises, high inflation figures and all that ridiculously negative media.
Every quarter we analyse sales activity for every suburb and town in Australia, because it’s a forward indictor of what will happen with prices.
In our latest survey, most of the suburbs in the Greater Perth area are categorised as rising or consistency markets.
This means the Perth market has been consistently strong in every quarter over the past two years, with well over a hundred suburbs categorised as rising markets.
To put that into perspective: in the quarterly surveys from 2015 through to the end of 2020, the average number of rising suburbs in Perth was just 29.
So current performance is four times those pre-2021 levels.
As we noted in other recent surveys, many of the stand-out municipalities are at the affordable end of the market.
This buoyancy at the lower end of the market confirms Perth’s status as the most affordable housing market in capital city Australia.
By that I mean that the median house price in Perth is currently the lowest among all the state and territory capital cities in Australia.
Across the Greater Perth Area, there are lots of suburbs where sales activity – which means buyer demand – has been rising strongly, quarter by quarter, over the past two years – and is still rising, amid all the current disruptions.
That steady pattern of increasing sales means prices must inevitably rise.
And, in the past 12 months, the median house price for Perth has continued to rise, according to the data published by multiple research sources, including PropTrack, SQM Research and CoreLogic.
According to SQM, house prices in Perth are 11% higher than this time last year.
And both SQM and PropTrack suggest prices have risen in the most recent months, in contrast to results in Sydney and Melbourne.
Perth’s real estate performance is underpinned by one of Australia’s strongest economies. Western Australia is one of the few states with a major Budget surplus and it ranks highly in the State of the States report by CommSec, in which it leads the nation on economic growth and employment.
Overall, Perth has been become one of the biggest targets for investors across Australia because the local economy is strong, the population is growing, real estate is cheap relative to other cities and the growth prospects are attractive.
