Price data for Sydney provides a striking example of why it’s so important not to generalise about property markets.

 

According to the big-name research sources, Sydney prices grew only a few percent overall in the past 12 months, but individual precincts within Greater Sydney have recorded price growth at boom levels.

 

Unfortunately for people trying to make informed real estate decisions, economists and journalists like to speak about “the Australian property market” and forecast what will happen with “Australian house prices” in the year ahead.

 

This is not only worthless information for Australians consumers, but it shouts very loudly that the economists and journalists making those generalisations know very little about residential real estate.

 

Even data on “Sydney house prices” is misleading and next to useless, because it tells us nothing about what’s happening in the Northern Beaches suburbs or in the many locations within the Canterbury-Bankstown LGA or out at Blacktown or further west at Penrith.

 

Because some of the individual precincts within the Greater Sydney metropolitan area have booming property markets.

 

According to PropTrack data, Sydney’s median house price grew just 2.5% in the past 12 months, but Hotspotting analysis shows that most of the suburbs in the City of Canterbury-Bankstown rose by 12-15% and some suburbs increased more than 20%. 

 

Several of the unit markets in this LGA have also recorded double-digit growth in their median prices.

 

It’s because this precinct is an out-performer within the Greater Sydney area that we have been featuring it as one of our main recommendations for Sydney over the past 12 months or so.

 

In the Bayside LGA, another market we have recommended in our Top 5 Sydney Hotspots report recently, many suburbs have recorded median price growth well above 10% in the past year – and this includes both house and unit markets.

 

It’s worth remembering that more than half of all sales across Greater Sydney now are attached dwellings – units, townhouses, apartments. The market share of houses on land has been falling steadily over the past 12-18 months and now attached dwellings dominate.

 

Several of the unit markets in the Bayside LGA, including some that have median prices in the $700,000s, have recorded double-digit annual price growth in defiance of the average results for Greater Sydney.

 

It's true also of the Inner West LGA, which is increasingly dominated by attached dwelling sales. The median house price in most suburbs is well above $2 million, but many suburbs have median unit prices in the $800,000s and $900,000s – and some of those have recorded median price growth in the 7% to 12% range in the past year.

 

Again, this is well above Sydney averages – and it highlights the key message, that real estate is local in nature and that buyers should be focusing on the areas that are likely to perform city norms.

 

And 2025 will be no different.