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<\/p>\nAustralia’s last holdout against a cooling house market is still on the way up, but years of rapid growth are expected to come to an end soon.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year Helen Burns sold her “little cottage” in the Adelaide Hills for about $800,000, venturing 350 kilometres south-east to a new home in the small town of Penola in South Australia’s South East.<\/p>\n
The move was motivated by family factors but deemed a “no-brainer” when she crunched the numbers.<\/p>\n
“[I] pretty much tripled the land size and doubled the house size for only $20,000 [more],” Ms Burns said.<\/p>\n
This kind of calculation saw regional prices rise in Victoria, the Northern Territory and South Australia, with regional SA the steepest of the bunch.<\/p>\n
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Helen and Geoff Burns moved to Penola in April with their dog Raven.\u00a0 (ABC South East SA: Aiden McNamara)<\/p>\n
On the ground in the lagging state<\/p>\n
The latest Domain property report showed prices outside of Adelaide rose 19 per cent in the past 12 months, with the median price at $595,000.<\/p>\n
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Housing data for the September 2026 quarter. (Supplied: Domain)<\/p>\n
A report from Proptrack earlier this year outlined how regional SA house prices had almost doubled<\/a> in the past five years.<\/p>\n Naracoorte real estate agent Margot Shortt described the past year as “nothing short of crazy” with many people getting into the market thinking it would keep rising.<\/p>\n Margot Shortt says an interest rate rise in November would be “another level of pain” for buyers. (ABC South East SA: Aiden McNamara)<\/p>\n While prices have continued to rise, Domain’s data only runs to September 30; and two days earlier, the RBA lifted interest rates to a 15-year high.<\/a><\/p>\n Ms Shortt said this, along with broader economic factors, meant calls and messages to the agency had “absolutely fallen off a cliff”.<\/p>\n “We have seen probably a 99 per cent decline in enquiries.”<\/p>\n She said it was hard to actually know if the local market was dropping given the lack of recent sales.<\/p>\n “Is the market terrible? We haven’t really seen too many transactions transpire so we can’t compare,” she said.<\/p>\n All capital cities down<\/p>\n The latest Domain property report showed Australia’s housing market <\/a>fell 4.7 per cent<\/a>, the steepest quarterly drop on record.<\/p>\n Every capital city has seen the median house price head south for the first time in 15 years.<\/p>\n But outside the capitals, data were more varied.<\/p>\n Adelaide University housing economist Chris Leishman said Sydney and Melbourne were generally the first to witness shifts and Adelaide was “always a fairly slower responder”.<\/p>\n He said you would expect regional SA to be the last housing market still growing as the rest of the country started to plateau or drop.<\/p>\n “Look at any state and compare it to its metropolitan city \u2026 the regional areas tend to perform strongly later in the cycle,” he said.<\/p>\n Professor Leishman said Australia is at the tail end of one of the longest and most pronounced housing booms ever seen.<\/p>\n Across all regional areas, the media house price fell 1.1 per cent in the last quarter.\u00a0 (ABC South East SA: Aiden McNamara)<\/p>\n Across Australia, he failed to see strong growth over the next couple of years and believed there “has to be a correction”.<\/p>\n “Markets tend not to crash though, particularly in Australia,” he said.<\/p>\n He expected six to 12 months of prices going down further, before starting to rise again in the long term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia’s last holdout against a cooling house market is still on the way up, but years of rapid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":940000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,79553,164,10930,7688,5626,468,474,2733,1098,122147,94,13262,506683,2185,36767,8539,136203],"class_list":["post-939999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-capital-gains","tag-economy","tag-house-prices","tag-housing","tag-interest-rates","tag-mount-gambier","tag-naracoorte","tag-nsw","tag-nt","tag-penola","tag-qld","tag-regional","tag-regional-house-prices","tag-rural","tag-sa","tag-tas","tag-vic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=939999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/940000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=939999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=939999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=939999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/52abc563a0375215a9b36affb6ff7587.jpeg\")
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