Coolabah Capital’s Chris Joye has posted the following chart on X (Twitter) showing that the current “crash” in Australian dwelling values is “officially the worst ever”:
Source: Chris Joye
“Current Aussie housing crash is the worst ever recorded since 1980 – national capital city prices are currently falling at a 16% annualised pace based on the last three months of Cotality data”, Joye wrote.
Joye notes that the current 7.6% decline from the March 2026 peak is the worst on record, beating the 7.0% decline recorded over the same period in 2022-23 after the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) hiked interest rates aggressively coming out of the pandemic.
In total, Cotality’s worst recorded decline was 8.6% between November 2017 and May 2019.
With dwelling values down 4.2% over the past quarter across the five main capital city markets, this suggests the record peak-to-trough decline will be broken by late November, with values likely nearing a 10% decline by year’s end.
The outlook for 2027 is also bleak, with the RBA highly likely to lift interest rates further and unemployment likely to rise above 5%.
As a result, housing demand will inevitably fall further, driving prices down, and more distressed mortgage holders will be forced to sell.
It’s not all “bad news”, however. As Peter Tulip noted in response to Joye’s Tweet, 61% of Australians surveyed support the “objective of bringing house prices down”:
The veracity of support for lower home prices is about to be tested.
