Home values rise 1.6% in March quarter
CoreLogic’s Home Value Index (HVI) rose 0.6 per cent over the month, on par with February’s increase and marking the 14th straight month of growth in housing values.
CoreLogic has announced growth in house prices across every capital city except Darwin throughout the month of March – this data lending further credence to the continued recovery of Australia’s housing markets.
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The firm noted that since the -7.5 per cent decline between April 2022 and January 2023, the national HVI has increased 10.2 per cent or by approximately $71,838 as a result of the record highs incurred each month since November of last year.
CoreLogic’s research director Tim Lawless remarked that “monthly gains continue to be punctuated by diversity”.
“At one end of the scale we have Perth’s housing market where values were up 1.9 per cent over the month, followed by Adelaide and Brisbane with 1.4 per cent and 1.1 per cent growth,” Lawless stated.
“The remaining capitals are showing much lower rates of change, although Melbourne is the only capital city to record a negative quarterly movement, down -0.2 per cent over the first three months of the year.”
The national quarterly pace of growth has similarly accelerated from 1.4 per cent in Q4 last year to 1.6 per cent in Q1 2024. Although housing values are additionally rising faster than at the end of last year, the quarterly trend of growth has halved in comparison to the middle of last year when home values were rising 3.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter.
Lawless explained this development in stating “rate hikes, cost-of-living pressures and worsening housing affordability [to all be] factors that have contributed to softer housing conditions since mid-last year”.
In further extrapolating these conditions, Lawless spoke of the effects of above average interstate and overseas migration rates in spurring higher purchasing demand and a shorter supply of housing in areas experiencing these “extreme flips” in demographic trends.
Last month’s Australian Bureau of Statistics population data was indicative of this notion in showcasing that net overseas migration was running well above average in most states and particularly in Western Australia where it registered 18,122 in the September quarter of last year, far ahead of the previous decade average of 4,639 per quarter.
It’s a contrast to last year, when the strongest growth conditions were largely in the upper quartile. This year has seen these favourable conditions shift to the lower quartile across most capital city markets, with a 3.1 per cent increase across lower quartile home values dwarfing the 0.7 rise seen in the upper quartile of the market.
Lawless cited both the increasing challenges associated with housing affordability and lower year-over-year borrowing capacity as reasons it was “no surprise to see demand being skewered towards the middle-to-lower end of the value spectrum”.
Regional housing markets were also reported as rising in value, showcasing similar trends of diversity to those observed in their capital city counterparts.
In sole opposition to this widespread growth, regional Victoria saw the softest growth conditions, with a -0.3 per cent decrease in the first quarter of the year. It marked the area the only “rest of state” region to record a decline in values in the year-to-date.
While the volume of home sales throughout the first quarter of the year have been estimated to be 9.5 per cent higher relative to Q1 last year, Lawless still acknowledged the low base nature of the comparison, considering the “bottoming out” seen in early 2023.
