The Market Has Turned. Has Your Agent?

I’m going to be straight with you. The property market has turned, and it’s turned a lot harder than most of the reports are letting on.

From 2020 we had five years of growth like I’ve never seen in my career. Ridiculous growth, really. Homes sold before the first open. Buyers paid well over the odds because they were terrified of missing out. A lot of people got used to that and started to think it was normal.

It wasn’t normal. And it’s over.

Right now I’m watching sellers drop their price by up to 20% before they get a single offer. I’m running open homes where nobody turns up. And I’m talking to a lot of confused, frustrated people who don’t know whether to sell, wait, or just pull the pin altogether.

If that sounds like you, keep reading.

First, what the official numbers say

Most people get their market news from the reports, so let’s start there.

Cotality’s national Home Value Index has now fallen six months in a row, and values are 5.2% below their March 2026 high. Over the three months to the end of September, 97% of capital city suburbs went backwards. Brisbane had the biggest monthly drop of any capital in September, down 1.5%.

Money is the main driver. The Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.60% on 29 September, its fourth rise this year, and that’s the highest it’s been since late 2011. Buyers simply can’t borrow what they could twelve months ago. On top of that, the Budget changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax have knocked a big chunk of investors out of the market.

The forecasters aren’t expecting a quick turnaround either. Morgan Stanley now expects national prices to fall 10 to 15% from peak, with the bottom in the second half of 2027. Their analysts said it would be “Australia’s largest nominal housing downturn in over 40 years.” CommBank is tipping a national fall of around 9%. AMP’s Shane Oliver says a worst case could see falls of 20%.

So officially, we’re about 5% down with more to come.

Now let me tell you what I’m actually seeing.

On the ground, it’s a lot worse than 5%

I’ve had properties that started in the $1.3 million to $1.5 million range that are now sitting around $1,050,000. One home started at $1.35 million and sold for $1.1 million. That’s $250,000 off, or about 18.5%. And that’s not a one-off.

As soon as a price goes up, buyers come in around 10% under it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already allowed for the downturn. They still go 10% below. In a lot of cases, inspections and offers don’t really start until the price has come down somewhere between 15 and 20% from where the seller first pitched it.

I’m talking to other Gold Coast agents every week and they’re telling me the same thing. My honest view is this. For a lot of sellers who priced their home off peak expectations, the real fall from where they started is closer to 20% than 5%.

Why the reports don’t match what’s happening on the street

There are two reasons the numbers you read and the numbers I’m seeing are so far apart.

The first is that most reports look in the rear-view mirror. A sale gets agreed and the contract is written. Then it has to get through finance, building and pest, and whatever other conditions are in there. Then it settles. Only after all that does it show up as a recorded sale. In my experience, a sale you read about this week could have been agreed up to 90 days ago. The price advice behind it might be older still.

In a rising market, that lag works in your favour. In a falling market, it works against you. Comparable sales tell you where the market was, not where it is.

The second reason is what the numbers actually measure. An index tracks how values have moved across the homes that sold. It doesn’t tell you how far an individual seller had to come down from their starting price. Medians also hide the hard cases. Even Cotality’s own figures show capital city vendors are now discounting their asking price by a median of 4.4% to get a contract, the most in five years, and that’s the middle of the pack, not the property that had to drop 18% to find a buyer. And homes that never sell don’t show up in sales figures at all.

The auction market is saying the same thing

If you want a window into buyer confidence, look at auctions.

Tom Panos has been auctioning in Sydney for 30 years and reports on the market just about every day. Back in July he said this:

“Today was the worst auction day of my real estate auction career.”

He’d taken six properties to auction that day and sold none of them. The next week, a five-bedroom home in Merrylands estimated at $2.8 to $2.85 million didn’t get a single bid, the second week running he’d had an auction with no registered bidders. He reckoned it was the lowest level of auction activity he’d personally seen, possibly since 1991.

That’s Sydney, and Tom’s mainly in the auction space, but it tells you where buyer confidence is sitting. Across the capitals, the clearance rate was averaging just over 48% in early October, down from 64.4% back in February.

When buyers won’t even register to bid, that’s not a marketing problem. That’s confidence and price.

I sold through the GFC. This is harder.

I was selling real estate through the Global Financial Crisis, so I’ve been here before. I’ll tell you now, this market is tougher.

The ABS has noted that Australia got off fairly lightly in the GFC compared to other countries, and our house price fall was relatively short. The Gold Coast did it harder than most. By 2012 the REIQ was saying the Coast had been through a major correction over the previous three years, with prices eroding since 2008.

The big difference this time is interest rates. In the GFC, the Reserve Bank slashed rates and put money back in buyers’ pockets. This time they’re going the other way. Buyers are losing borrowing power while prices are falling, and there’s no circuit breaker coming any time soon.

Price has to meet perception. That’s a principle.

This is the one thing I want every seller to understand, because it doesn’t change no matter what the market’s doing.

Inspections happen and offers come in when the buyer’s perception matches the price of the property. That was true in the boom, it was true in the GFC, and it’s true right now.

You can have the best photos on the Coast, a beautiful video and a great listing. Doesn’t matter. If buyers don’t believe the price is within their expectation, they won’t come. Yeah, nah, they’ll just scroll straight past it.

See, in a rising market, people pay overs because they’re scared of missing out. In this market, that fear has flipped. Buyers are scared of paying too much for something that might be worth less next month. So until your property meets their perception, it’s not going to attract buyers. Simple as that.

Look through the windscreen, not the rear-view mirror

The most up-to-date market information you’ll ever get isn’t in a report. It’s in your own campaign.

Every listing throws off live data: how many people view it online, how many go through the photos, how many open the floor plan, how many save it or share it, how many enquire, how many turn up to inspect, and how many make an offer.

Put those together and they tell you exactly what buyers think right now.

Say you’ve got a thousand photo views, a hundred floor plan views, plenty of saves and shares, and nobody at the open. That tells me people are interested in the property. They’re just not interested at that price.

If people are coming through but no offers are landing, they’ve had a look and decided it doesn’t stack up at the price. Usually that’s price. Sometimes it’s condition.

And if hardly anyone is even looking online, then we need to look at the marketing, the presentation, or whether the price has you sitting in the wrong search bracket.

None of that cares what the place down the road sold for three months ago.

Selling and buying in a falling market: speed is leverage

A lot of my sellers are also buyers. They’re selling one place to buy another in the same market, and this is where people make their most expensive mistake.

If the market’s falling, it’s falling across the board. The home you’re selling and the home you want to buy are both dropping. So the order you do things in really matters.

Here’s a simple example. The numbers are made up, and it assumes the market keeps falling.

Say your home is worth $1,000,000 and you want to move up to a $1,500,000 home. The gap is $500,000. If both drop 10% before you act, you’re looking at $900,000 and $1,350,000. The gap’s now $450,000.

But say you sell now at $1,000,000 and buy after a further 10% fall at $1,350,000. Your gap is $350,000.

Downsizers work on the same logic. If you sell before further falls and buy afterwards, you free up more money than if you sit and wait to do both.

There’s another benefit too. Once you’ve sold, you walk into your next purchase as a buyer who isn’t subject to the sale of their own home. Sellers love that, and it gives you real bargaining power.

The sellers who hang on for last year’s price usually end up chasing the market down. Every price drop comes a bit too late, and they end up with less than they’d have got if they’d priced it right from day one.

Now, selling first isn’t for everyone. You might need to rent, you might move twice, and holding costs at today’s rates aren’t cheap. Nobody can tell you exactly where the bottom is. Have a chat with your lender and a financial adviser before you lock in your plan. Just make it a decision, not something that happens to you by default.

People are confused, and confusion turns to anger

I want to talk about something that doesn’t show up in any report, and that’s how people are feeling.

People are confused right now. Twelve months ago their neighbour sold for a record price, and now they’re being told their home is worth a lot less. That’s hard to hear. And what I’ve learned over the years is that confusion often turns into anger.

We’re seeing it personally. Buyers and sellers are getting aggressive with agents. I understand where it comes from. People are scared, and a lot of their life savings are tied up in their home.

But here’s the truth. Agents don’t control the market. If an agent is doing their job properly, the marketing is right and the campaign is being run well, the result still comes down to what buyers are prepared to pay on the day. All we can do is work within the market we’ve got, and help you make the best decision you can inside it.

Panic is not your friend in this market. Not for sellers, not for buyers, and not for agents either.

Fair-weather agents

During the boom, a lot of people came into real estate. It looked like easy money, and for a while it was. I’ve seen people who used to mow lawns jump in and start selling houses.

The numbers back this up. Office of Fair Trading figures reported by the ABC showed Queensland agent numbers sat around 41,000 through 2020. More than 3,500 new licences had been issued by early 2022, and agent numbers peaked at over 45,000 in October that year. The REIQ said at the time that fewer than 10,000 of those were full-time agents.

A lot of those people are now walking away. I’m talking to experienced agents every week who are seriously thinking about doing something else. There’s no ifs and buts about it, this is a very disturbing time for our industry.

The problem for sellers is that many of the agents still out there have never had to have a hard conversation. They’ve never run an open with nobody at it, or finished a campaign with no offers, or sat across the kitchen table and told someone their price has to come down.

In a rising market, an inflated appraisal costs you nothing because the market catches up. In this market, it costs you time, money and every buyer who saw your home sitting there and decided it was stale. If an agent only tells you what you want to hear, ask yourself who that’s really helping.

What you actually need in an agent right now

In this market, the skills that matter are patience, understanding and negotiation. You want someone who’s been through a falling market before, who can read buyers, and who won’t panic when things get tough.

Before you sign with anyone, ask them a few questions:

• Have you sold through a falling market before? Which one?
• What will you do if there are no inspections in the first two weeks?
• What campaign numbers will you give me every week?
• Is your price advice based on settled sales, or on what buyers are doing right now?
• How will you protect my negotiating position when buyers are scarce?
• If I’m buying as well, how should I sequence the two?

You’ll learn a lot from how they answer.

What we’re hearing from buyers right now

This is the part I most want you to take away, because it’s what we’re dealing with every single day.

Buyer feedback is everything at the moment. Buyers are telling us exactly what they think a property is worth, both in what they say at the open and in where their offers land. It’s consistently below what sellers are hoping for, and often well below what recent sales would suggest. Perception is driving this market, and right now perception is a long way under where sellers’ expectations are sitting.

It doesn’t matter what the valuers say. Actually, the valuers are getting nervous too. I was talking with a valuer recently who told me the market risk ratings on their reports are now coming in at threes and fours. On a standard residential valuation report, market risk is rated from 1 to 5 across things like recent market direction, market volatility, local economy impact and market segment conditions, where 3 is medium and 4 is medium to high. Depending on how cautious the lender is, a 4 or 5 can stop a loan from getting approved.

That’s not good. It means banks are being more cautious, valuations are coming in tighter, and some buyers who’ve agreed on a price are finding their finance harder to get over the line.

Put all that together and the general feel is clear. We’re in a correction. Buyers know it, valuers know it, and the sooner sellers accept it, the better their result will be.

What we’re doing about it

We’re not just sitting back and waiting for this to pass. We’ve been working on new ways to make selling more transparent and easier for buyers, sellers and agents.

In the coming weeks we’ll be launching a new platform called QTA, short for Qualified Terms Auction. It’s been designed to make the auction process more transparent and fairer for everyone involved. I’ll share more on that soon.

We know there’s a lot of confusion and fear out there right now. We’re doing our best to meet it head on.

Questions I’m getting asked a lot

Are property prices falling in Australia?

Yes. Cotality’s index has fallen six months in a row, and national values were 5.2% below the March 2026 peak at the end of September. On the ground, many sellers are seeing much bigger drops from their original asking price.

How far could prices fall?

Forecasts range from around 8 to 15%, with Morgan Stanley tipping 10 to 15% and AMP’s Shane Oliver warning of up to 20% in a worst case. On the Gold Coast, I’m already seeing sellers come down 15 to 20% from where they started.

Should I sell now or wait?

That depends on your situation. If you need to sell, pricing it right from the start almost always gets a better result than chasing the market down. If you don’t need to sell, waiting might be an option, but nobody can tell you exactly when the bottom will be.

Should I sell before I buy?

If the market keeps falling, selling first and buying afterwards can put you in a much stronger position. It can also mean renting or moving twice, so talk to your lender and a financial adviser first.

Why do recent sales show higher prices than buyers will pay?

Because recent sales are old news. A sale recorded this week could have been agreed months ago. In a falling market, those prices can be well above what buyers will pay today.

The bottom line

The market has turned. Prices are falling, rates are up, and buyers have all the time and choice in the world.

You can still sell well in this market, but it won’t forgive mistakes. Overpricing, slow decisions and relying on old sales data will cost you far more now than they ever did in the boom.

Just remember, buyers inspect and make offers when the price meets their perception. Find an agent who understands that, who reads the live data, who’s been through this before, and who’s willing to have the hard conversation early. In this market, that’s worth a lot more than a cheaper commission.

The market has turned. Make sure your agent has too.

Want to Know What Your Home Will Really Sell For in This Market?

Most agents will hand you a CMA, a comparative market analysis with some pretty pictures of houses that sold a few months ago. In this market, that’s just more rear-view mirror.

We do things differently. We prepare a full Vendor Information Memorandum, which is a complete sale feasibility study for your property. It takes a lot more into account than recent sales. These are detailed reports, and they’re helping people make informed decisions based on real facts about the market as it is today.

If you’re thinking about selling, or you’re just trying to work out where you stand, give us a few details about your home. We’ll prepare your Vendor Information Memorandum and send it out to you.