Chris Curtis is the Principal of Curtis Associates, a leading Sydney buyers’ agency he founded in 2007. A buyer and developer of residential and commercial properties since 1987 and an AAPI Certified Property Practitioner, he is also a former barrister and investment banker.
Sydney property buying – historical, present and future snapshots
September 16th, 2025As a long-term AAPI Certified Property Practitioner, our Principal last month attended the Australian Property Institute’s annual Kiparra Day.
Of the hundreds of slides shown by Australian and Sydney property experts, this eight from well regarded sources provided useful snapshots into both historical, present and likely future Sydney property market trends across all asset classes.
These were the key takeaways from this curated sample:
- historically, the Sydney property market , especially for houses, has been the strongest of all national property markets. In addition to exceeding the inflation rate by almost five times, those prices have eclipsed other national housing markets over the past 50 years. Given the traditional rivalry between the two most populous States, Brisbane’s house price increases surprisingly relegated Melbourne’s to third place
- Sydney houses have been a better investment than units. Given the laws of supply and demand, we expect that trend to strengthen strongly in future
- commercial real estate has also performed well but and also surprising despite severe climate change induced challenges, rural property price increases over the past 20 years exceeded increases in all other property classes
- irrespective of the hype surrounding industrial property, it is a softening asset class
- all property markets in Sydney remain highly sensitive to interest rate movements which and regardless of money market expectations, are difficult (read impossible) to predict
- while the three recent interest rate reductions this year caused Sydney’s residential property market to bounce, a question mark remains about the sustainability of that bounce given the spike in investors selling out of that market.
- global uncertainty (read Trump), also weighs heavily on buyer sentiment
- despite hype about a handful of actual (read possible) eastern suburbs and lower north shore property consolidations, there is no prospect of the National Housing Accord meeting its targets.
