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If you have been watching the property market lately, you have probably seen the headlines: prices slowing, sentiment cooling, and first home buyers stepping back to wait for a better opportunity.
It is an understandable reaction. If prices are falling, wouldn’t it make sense to wait until they hit the bottom?
The trouble is that nobody rings a bell when the bottom arrives. Australia’s property market has been through this exact pattern before, more than once. Buyers wait for a clear signal that it’s safe to buy, and by the time that signal shows up, prices have already started climbing.
For first home buyers, trying to perfectly time the market has often proven costlier than buying as soon as you are financially ready.
Property markets do not move in a straight line. They move through growth, slowdown, correction and recovery, again and again. No two cycles are identical, but the pattern of decline followed by recovery has repeated across almost every major downturn in the past three decades. Here are three examples that show how consistent that pattern has been.
Following tighter lending standards and the fallout from the Banking Royal Commission, credit became harder to access and property prices across Sydney and Melbourne began to slide. Sydney’s dwelling values fell 13.2% from their July 2017 peak to the February 2019 trough. Melbourne fell 9.6% from its November 2017 peak over the same period, and combined capital city values recorded their deepest correction since 1989.
Many buyers chose to wait, expecting the falls to continue. Instead, a combination of interest rate cuts and looser lending conditions triggered a sharp recovery. Within roughly two years, both cities had clawed back their losses, and many properties went on to exceed their previous peak values.
The fastest run of interest rate rises in a generation triggered another national correction. Between May 2022 and January 2023, national dwelling values fell 8.4%, at the time the steepest peak-to-trough decline on record. Sydney fell 13% and Melbourne fell 8.6%, while Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth proved far more resilient, each falling only a few percentage points.
Once again, many prospective buyers paused their plans, waiting for further falls. Instead, within about a year the market turned. Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth pushed on to new record highs, and Sydney and Melbourne recovered a large share of what they had lost. Buyers who waited for a clearer signal often found themselves purchasing after values had already started climbing again.
Perth’s cycle is the most dramatic example of all. Dwelling values more than doubled during the mining boom between 2000 and 2007. When the boom faded, Perth entered one of the longest downturns of any Australian capital, with values falling around 20% peak to trough between June 2014 and September 2019, a decline that played out over more than five years.
For years, the consensus was that Perth prices would stay flat indefinitely. Instead, population growth, tight housing supply and renewed demand from 2020 onward drove one of the strongest recoveries the country has seen, with values up more than 80% since the 2020 trough and sitting at record highs.
The lesson is not that every suburb always increases in value. It is that Australian property markets have consistently moved through cycles of decline and recovery, and those cycles have tended to turn well before public sentiment catches up.
Many buyers assume they will simply know when the time is right. In practice, the signals that make a market feel “safe” (falling interest rates, positive headlines, rising auction clearance rates) are the same signals that bring other buyers back at the same time.
More buyers competing for the same limited stock generally means stronger demand and, in many cases, faster price growth. That is exactly what played out after 2019 and again after 2023: the buyers who were waiting for confidence to return ended up competing with everyone else who was waiting for the same thing, often after values had already started climbing.
Queensland continues to attract strong interstate migration, sustained infrastructure investment and steady population growth. Looking further ahead, the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games are expected to bring billions of dollars in transport upgrades, urban renewal and infrastructure projects across South East Queensland.
The Olympics alone will not determine future property prices. But they sit within a much larger picture that includes housing demand, employment growth and continued investment across the region. For buyers planning to stay in a property for many years, these long term fundamentals tend to matter more than short term price movements.
Instead of asking whether you have found the exact bottom of the market, it is more useful to ask yourself a different set of questions.
If the answer to these is yes, history suggests that buying when you are financially ready has, more often than not, outperformed waiting for perfect market conditions.
No one rings a bell to announce the bottom of the property market. By the time the headlines turn positive and buyer confidence returns, the opportunity many people were waiting for has often already passed. Past performance never guarantees future results, but Australia’s property market has repeatedly shown that periods of uncertainty tend to be followed by recovery.
For first home buyers, the goal should not be finding the perfect day to buy. It should be making a well informed decision that supports your long term financial future.