Brisbane has officially surpassed the $1 million median house price and $700,000 for units, a historic moment that signals major shifts in the local market. In this episode, Melinda and Scott Jennison break down what’s behind these new records and what it means for buyers right now.
From rising buyer competition and FOMO to the sharp growth in unit values and ongoing rental pressure, we share what’s happening on the ground and in the data, plus how to stay ahead in a fast-moving market.
What we cover:
– Brisbane’s record-breaking median prices
– The gap between A-grade and impacted properties
– How units are leading growth in the affordable segment
– Why buyer confidence is surging
– Key risks and opportunities for 2025 buyers
If you’re planning to enter the Brisbane market, this episode will give you the clarity and confidence you need to make smarter decisions.
Connect with Us:
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- Streamline Property Buyers Website https://streamlineproperty.com.au/
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Transcript
00:00
Scott Jennison: Hi everyone, on this week’s podcast, it’s market update time.
00:03
Melinda Jennison: We have very big news out of Brisbane. Cotality data has confirmed the median house price in Brisbane has surpassed the 1 million-dollar price point for the first time in history. That, and the fact that the median unit price has surpassed 700,000 dollars for the first time in history. We’ll break it all down in today’s episode.
00:22
(On-screen text: BRISBANE PROPERTY PODCAST, EPISODE 264 Brisbane Property Market Update May 2025. Welcome to the Brisbane Property Podcast with your hosts Melinda and Scott Jennison.)
00:27
Scott Jennison: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Brisbane Property Podcast with Scott and Melinda Jennison. It’s market update time for May.
00:34
Melinda Jennison: What a month it has been here in Brisbane. We have passed some historical milestones in the last 30 days when we look at the Cotality data. For those that may have missed the last couple of months of our market updates, remember Cotality is formerly known as CoreLogic. When we reference Cotality, this is CoreLogic data.
00:57
For the very first time in history, the median value for houses here in Greater Brisbane has surpassed that 1 million-dollar price point, and also the median value for a unit in Greater Brisbane has exceeded the 700,000-dollar price point. This is a significant shift, and when we look back at the last five years of growth, it really is astronomical.
01:19
Scott Jennison: I do remember doing some podcasts. I remember one that sticks out when we said the housing market, the median housing market, has gone over 800, and we thought it was quite amazing. Now we’re over a million. A million and 422. The unit values have exceeded that 700, as you mentioned Melinda, hitting 709,823.
01:44
Melinda Jennison: It’s absolutely solidified Brisbane’s standing as the second most expensive capital city market Australia-wide, second behind Sydney. That is for both the house market and the unit market. We have talked in other podcasts about the fact that yes, the median value is more expensive here in Brisbane. However, we’ve also taken a deeper dive to discover that the price per square metre, that is what you actually get for that one million dollars here in Brisbane, is a lot more than what you’ll get for the same dollar value in Melbourne. I think that’s important for listeners to understand. Yes, the median value is more expensive, but because our land sizes, our house sizes, are larger, you’re still getting more bang for your buck. You’re getting more for your money for that one-million-dollar median price.
02:32
Scott Jennison: For those people that are down south and listening, if you have a look at your market and go to realestate.com.au and do a search for something in close proximity to the CBD with views, things like that, compare that in Sydney and Melbourne to Brisbane and have a look at the size of the land and the size of the house. Just understand the difference in that price. It’s not a surprise in a way, with the amount of people we see out and about in Brisbane, multiple offers, limited stock, it’s seen that climb again. In the last month, median values rose by 0.6% in May, and in April it was 0.4% as well.
03:17
Melinda Jennison: It’s definitely re-accelerating here in Brisbane. It’s not a surprise. If you’ll remember last month, we talked about the fact that we had multiple long weekends, weekend after weekend after weekend. I think there were three in a row. We also had the Easter school holidays, and then we’ve had the federal election. There’s been a lot of uncertainty and disruption to the real estate market, especially here in Brisbane, in the last month. However, throughout May we’ve seen stability. We’ve seen those buyers return to the market. It’s not a surprise to us that we’re seeing FOMO re-enter where there are quality properties. There is so much demand. We as a team have been involved in so many multiple offer situations in the last two to three weeks. There’s a depth of buyers for some types of properties in some locations that’s huge.
04:09
We were looking at a unit for a client in Windsor, for example. There were 18 offers after the very first open home. That means 17 other buyers are in the market still to buy, and including our buyer, they were not the highest offer because there’s a lot of people that are stretching just to get into the market. We’ve experienced a multiple offer situation with seven offers in a north-side location for a house and land type of product in an established location. Seven offers were received on that particular property, and I think that’s been the least competitive that we’ve experienced in the last three weeks. Seven buyers for one property is the least competitive it’s been, and then 18 buyers for one property is the most competitive that we’ve seen.
05:02
We were even involved in an auction for a townhouse product at in the inner southwest location, 14 registered bidders. Based on our appraisal, there were two bidders that took the property value about 200,000 dollars above where we felt the actual value sits. 14 registered bidders, 12 bidders actually dropped out around the 1.4 million dollar mark, and then the remaining two bidders took the property value up another 350,000 dollars above that point. This is what happens with quality real estate. People fight for it, and we’re seeing evidence of that in Brisbane. I mentioned to my team even, some properties right now remind me of that post-COVID boom frenzy. We’re starting to see it again.
05:57
I will be very honest in saying there are also other properties that have very limited interest. Those properties that have limited interest need a lot of work done, or they have impacts such as being in flood-impacted areas or on busy roads; they’re less desirable properties. The A-grade properties, the homes that are in the best neighbourhoods in affordable locations and in price points under 1.5 million dollars, are walking out the door. More expensive properties are taking a little longer to sell, and those properties that do have impacts are also staying on the market for a lot longer. This market is multi-speed. There’s a multi-speed market in Brisbane, and it’s so important to understand, if you are a buyer, which part of the market you’re sitting in so you know how competitive it’s likely to be.
06:44
Scott Jennison: And also the scarcity side of it as well. You touched on the units, obviously when you mentioned the amount of multiple offers. The units compared to the house one example. That sector of the market is really, really driving things. We’re still seeing that sector of the market, the unit market, very, very strong in terms of growth. Median unit values, they increased 1.1% in May, compared to 0.5% of the houses, and quarterly growth for units also leads at 2.4%, while houses were 1.5% over the same period.
07:19
Melinda Jennison: Units are the more affordable segment of the market. Remember, most first home buyer incentives, the thresholds here in Brisbane for first home buyers in terms of those stamp duty concessions, cut off at 700,000 dollars. Now that we’ve seen the median value for units just slip over that price point, the more affordable properties are highly sought after by first home buyers because of the additional concessions that they are given in that segment of the market. It’s not a surprise to us that median values have still been moving at a faster rate than houses. Units have been growing faster because they are much more affordable, and they’re also in locations that are desirable. We’re seeing the younger generation and even investors, as well as downsizers, all competing for the same product type, and this is what’s driving that demand pressure.
08:11
Scott Jennison: We might have to see the government lift that stamp duty threshold a little bit, the way prices are going. If your unit median unit values are over that 700 mark, they might have to start to look at lifting that as well. Talking about properties and the interest in properties as well, days on market, it’s dropped again. We’ve gone from 24 days in April to 22 days in May. It just reinforces that urgency then that buyers are seeing, and what we’re seeing as well in the market. People wanting to get in, properties are selling really fast. We’re back again to some properties, this is not all properties as Melinda mentioned earlier, but we’re back to some properties being listed, first open on Saturday, sold Saturday afternoon.
08:53
Melinda Jennison: The numbers that you’ve mentioned there are average days on market, and we’re still not certain from the data houses in terms of how is that measured. Is that days to contract, or is it days to unconditional? Because here in Queensland, for those people that aren’t familiar with our contract process, quite often conditional contracts are entered into, and we are seeing conditional contracts being entered into by buyers literally within days, certainly not a two or three-week window. For properties that have impacts, yes, it is longer days on market, but for quality properties, we’re seeing a matter of days, not weeks, on market.
09:29
Again, data is great, but unless you see what’s actually going to contract and how quickly it’s going to contract, that data can be a little bit misleading. It’s certainly not 22 days for you to make a decision on a property when agents might open it on a Saturday and close at 5:00 PM on the same day, meaning if you’re not in with your offer by that time, you simply will miss out.
09:49
Scott Jennison: I think one other thing that we’ve noticed is the confidence in the market and in people as well. Whether it’s because we’ve, all those holidays have finished, the public holidays as you mentioned earlier, we’ve had our federal election, interest rates have had a drop, the sun’s out up here in Brisbane. It’s glorious. I know that whilst we’re getting on the confidence bit, I’ll go to the weather quickly, but I even spoke to my mum recently in Tamworth in country New South Wales, and she was telling me it was one degree down there overnight, and I thought we were cold here. It felt like that. I still got up and went swimming in the morning. We’ve got those blue sky winter mornings up here in Brisbane where it’s fresh and crisp, and you might get down to about that 10-degree mark, but your days are just absolutely beautiful. That’s why people, I think, love Brisbane so much.
10:42
Back to the confidence in the market, you can just see that with people. People wanting to get into the market, people wanting to move, and people wanting to buy property.
10:49
Melinda Jennison: And it’s actually coming through in the data as well. The consumer sentiment index, which is put out by Westpac Melbourne Institute, that’s also increased. We’re starting to see more positive consumer sentiment coming through. The time to buy a dwelling index has increased again. People are feeling more confident, generally speaking, about buying a home. Building approval data, that has also come out just recently. It does point to some overall improvements in building approvals Australia-wide, although we’re still well short of the housing accord targets.
11:23
While the federal government have set in place targets to build a certain number of new dwellings over a number of years, we are well behind in terms of where those targets sit. It’s encouraging to see numbers increase, but at the current volumes, we’re definitely well below what’s required to meet those housing accord targets. It’s also relevant to the fact that the future supply that we were hoping for simply is not coming at the speed that we need it. That pressure on prices is likely to continue until we see a significant shift, a significant increase in the number of properties that are available for property buyers to buy. That is new builds or listings.
12:04
Scott Jennison: And also getting the trades. That’s still going to be something that’s going to be ongoing for a while. Hopefully, that does increase and obviously increase those building approvals as well, so we can get some more dwellings up here as well. I did want to share, before we get into the actual data, some news out. Research from Australian Property Investor, property sentiment report for quarter one 2025. This is a survey that goes out to all property investors who subscribe to the Australian Property Investor magazine. The research that they have conducted shows that investors remain cautiously optimistic, especially in Brisbane and Queensland as a whole.
12:46
Queensland continues to attract strong interest from investors, and Brisbane has been highlighted as one of the most popular investment destinations nationally, with 32% of investors identifying Brisbane as the location where they are most likely to buy in 2025. And that’s second behind Perth, which is interesting that Perth is still in number one position because we are starting to see those Perth numbers fall off from where they were 12 months ago in terms of the rate of growth. Although we are also hearing from our buyers’ agent colleagues on the ground that there’s some pockets in Perth that are continuing to perform well and other areas not so well. Again, a typical market where we’re going to see certain pockets outperform others.
13:28
Scott Jennison: How often does this report come out?
13:30
Melinda Jennison: This is a quarterly report.
13:31
Scott Jennison: Quarterly report. It’ll be interesting to see as things move on, we’ll keep an eye on this to see what areas people identified to most likely to buy in, especially now that in Brisbane we’ve got all the Olympic side of things being confirmed and decided, and when they actually start to turn over a bit of dirt and we see the final designs, there’s always news popping up where we see things about the main stadium at Victoria Park and things like that. I think as that happens and it starts to get that momentum, people will get on the excitement of that a little bit as well.
14:08
Melinda Jennison: Let’s get into some of the data. Brisbane dwelling values, we did see an increase of 0.6% according to Cotality data, which is a re-acceleration. In April, this was 0.4%, so we’ve increased the rate of growth by 0.2% throughout May. The quarterly increase for dwellings in Brisbane now stands at 1.6% growth, and annually, Brisbane dwellings have increased 6.2%. If we want to expand that out to a 10-year trajectory, growth has reached 91.6% in Brisbane over the last 10 years, and in the last 5 years alone, 73.6% growth. This is huge, and I guess this is one of the reasons why so many buyers are really struggling to understand values at the moment because of this enormous growth that we have experienced in the last five years.
15:00
Scott Jennison: And obviously, Brisbane, the momentum is still strong. Sydney, Melbourne posed a little bit slower monthly growth, but Brisbane continues to be the top performer. Or one of the top performers. According to PropTrack, Brisbane dwellings grew 0.24% in May, and a modest uptick from the 0.19% gain in April.
15:22
Melinda Jennison: Again, we just like to highlight what both big data houses are reporting. Both Cotality and PropTrack are showing the same increase in growth and re-acceleration in growth for dwellings.
15:35
Scott Jennison: I’ll stick to PropTrack, and you can go to Cotality because I still want to call it CoreLogic. I don’t know why, but I’m still stuck on that, and I struggle with the new name, but anyway, I’ll get there eventually.
15:45
Melinda Jennison: We all do.
15:45
Scott Jennison: The segments.
15:47
Melinda Jennison: The lowest 25% of property values are still recording the highest quarterly growth rate. The most affordable segment has increased 2.1% in the three months to the end of March, and the most expensive segment of the Brisbane market has only shifted 0.1% over the same period. Now, what we are expecting to see as interest rates have come off, is for that top end to stimulate once again. However, we are in a market that is driven by affordability. We are seeing the more affordable properties move at a faster rate. And as we’ve pointed out previously, this is dwelling data, so we do know because the units and townhouses make up a large portion of the lowest 25% of property values here in Brisbane, they will also be driving a lot of that growth in the more affordable segments because that segment of the market is growing at a faster rate than the housing market itself.
16:44
Scott Jennison: Housing values. As we mentioned earlier, we’ve reached a median of 1,422 dollars. And in May, this is a 0.5% increase over the month, up 0.4% from April. Quarterly growth now sits at 1.5%, and an annual growth of 6.2%, slightly down from the 6.8% reported in April.
17:10
Melinda Jennison: It’s interesting with house values here in Brisbane. In February, we didn’t have any change in values. In March, we saw 0.3% growth. In April, 0.4%, and now in May, we’re at 0.5%. You can see that gradual uptick in price movement or re-acceleration in growth. This is not huge growth, but if you are shopping with a 1 million-dollar price point, with a 0.5% increase, it’s 5,000 dollars over a period of four weeks. It is significant if you are in the market, especially if you are looking for a period of two or three months. That can be 15,000 dollars of of price change during your search. I think that’s one of the reasons why people turn to buyers’ agents to fast-track that search for them and ultimately get them into the market faster when the stock is available to do so.
17:58
Scott Jennison: And PropTrack obviously saw an increase of 0.25% in Brisbane houses in the month of May, which is a slight improvement from the 0.21% seen in April.
18:10
Melinda Jennison: Same trend as we saw in the Cotality data there as well. Unit values, we’ve already talked about the fact that the unit market is still, still growing at a faster rate than the house market here in Brisbane. Throughout the month of May, units shifted 1.1% over the four-week period compared to houses, 0.5%. That’s a re-acceleration. Last month, in April, units only shifted 0.5%. We’ve really seen the unit market tick up once again. Quarterly growth in this segment of the market, 2.4%, and annual growth 11.8%. Annual growth in houses, 6.2%, so you can see just how different both segments of the market are, and it’s so important, one of the reasons why we do need to break down the segments because when we look at dwelling data, it’s all combined. Whereas when we’re looking at the units versus the houses, we can see how that differs in the market.
19:02
Scott Jennison: PropTrack reported a 0.18% monthly growth in Brisbane. Obviously a little bit less, but very, very strong, that unit market for sure.
19:13
Melinda Jennison: Moving on to the rental market now. It’s still a tight market in Brisbane. Vacancy rates remained unchanged month on month, currently sitting at 1% city-wide. And of course, there are some pockets where vacancy rates will be slightly higher and slightly lower than this overall Brisbane average. But rents are re-accelerating. There’s going to be affordability caps in some areas that will prevent further rent price growth. We know that, we understand that, and we are seeing that, but in other areas, we are starting to see rents increase once again.
19:45
Annual growth in house rents, that’s increased to 3.2%. Last month, that annual growth rate was 3%, so you can see that slight re-acceleration in the rate of growth. That’s now sitting slightly above inflation once again. In the unit segment of the market, the annual rent price growth is 4.3% and that’s up from, sorry, it’s 4.5%, that’s up from 4.3% the month prior. We are seeing that unit market track much faster in terms of rent price growth compared to the CPI rate or inflation rate. It’s really important to to understand that. We’re going to see higher returns for rent, more rental price growth in the unit market compared to the house market based on current data.
20:30
Scott Jennison: And keep an eye on that investors. Obviously, that’s really important, as Melinda said. As that starts to increase, you’ll see that cap where people, affordability side of things for those rents to keep increasing. There’s a little tip. Gross rental yields, really steady for houses, 3.5%, while unit yields edged down slightly to 4.5% from 4.6% last month.
20:53
Melinda Jennison: And that’s a result of the prices, median values of units increasing a little bit faster than the median rents in units have increased. Inevitably, when yields are decreasing, it’s usually evidence of property values increasing. That’s something to keep in mind. Sometimes it can be because rents are falling, but that’s not the case in this instance. It is the case that values are rising at a faster rate than rents are rising.
21:17
Scott Jennison: A little bit of a summary on there. On the ground, what we’re seeing, we’re seeing some good turnouts at auctions. We’re seeing a lot of people bidding at auctions. The shoes outside the door. I probably sound like I’m repeating myself here, and this has continued on and on. It seems to have, it does seem to have picked up again. We talked about, and we’ve talked about this for quite a while now where a lot of interest in properties, a lot of people turning up, but it just seems like there’s an uptick on it again as we look on the ground. It’s good to be able to have the data and then compare that to what we see as a team. The team here at Streamline Property Buyers, we are out and about on weekends. We don’t take weekends off like others, so we are out and about, we’re looking at the market, we see who’s bidding, who’s out. We love it when people come up and talk to us about the podcast as well. But that side of it, there’s that confidence in the market again a little bit as well.
22:09
Melinda Jennison: And the biggest concern is that listings do remain low. Between last month and the current month, we did see a small uptick in overall total listings, but not enough to absorb the demand that’s in the market, as evidenced by some of those stories we’ve told in terms of the number of buyers putting forward offers on properties. We are hearing stories also of some buyers stretching with unconditional offers and waving cooling off just to secure properties. Sadly, we’re hearing some buyers’ agents are encouraging their clients to stretch and remove all of their rights to conditions and waving cooling off. And through our agent network, we’re hearing some, some people are stretching like tens of thousands of dollars above other offers just to secure properties.
22:56
Be very aware, make sure you understand where the comparable market sales sit, and of course, if you are removing conditions to become more competitive, understand the risk if you don’t actually get a valuation that stacks up because if you default on a contract, there are serious consequences that you need to be aware of. The message there is get professional guidance and understand where that value sits before you’re placing offers, and build a professional team around you that really do care for your outcome and have your best interests at heart.
23:28
Scott Jennison: And if you need to have a chat with us, reach out to the team at Streamline Property Buyers. We’re always here, as I say over and over, we’re free to talk to. Don’t be afraid to reach out and have a chat. We can explain what we do and how we work as well, as a team here in Brisbane. That’s been the market update, as usual. I will repeat myself again, and I’ll let Melinda wrap things up. It’s been good talking from beautiful, sunny Brisbane, a little bit fresh but sunny. Until next week, take care and bye for now.
23:55
Melinda Jennison: Yes, thanks once again for joining us on the Brisbane Property Podcast. We hope you have enjoyed this market update, and as always, if you feel that this information would be beneficial to share with others, please spread the word, share with friends and family. We would love for you to subscribe to our podcast so that you don’t miss future episodes. But until next week, we hope you have a wonderful week and we look forward to speaking with you again then. Bye for now.