Property

Every time a property changes hands electronically in Australia, a line item appears in the settlement statement that most buyers and sellers never question.

Australian dwelling values fell around 0.9% at the five-city aggregate level over the month to 17 July 2026, with the downturn broadening across nearly every major market. The slide is accelerating, not stabilising.

Cotality's national Home Value Index fell 0.4% in June 2026, the largest single-month decline since December 2022. Combined capital-city values dropped 1.3% across the June quarter, with the worst falls concentrated in the two largest markets.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers kept it brief on Budget night. "We'll limit negative gearing for residential property to new builds from July next year. And we're replacing the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount with inflation-adjusted indexation, to restore the taxation of real gains," Chalmers said.

Your mortgage, your suburb, your retirement plan. For a long time, rising house prices felt like the one thing Australians could agree on wanting. That assumption has cracked.

Cotality's national Home Value Index dropped 0.4% in June 2026, the largest single-month fall recorded since December 2022. Drawn from Cotality's hedonic measure of dwelling values, that figure is not a rounding error; it signals the correction has gained real momentum.

The combined capitals preliminary clearance rate rose to 54.8% on the weekend of 11 July 2026, marking the highest reading in seven weeks and the first time above 50% in three weeks , up from 49.8% the prior weekend. Cotality published the preliminary figures on Sunday 13 July 2026.

Australian residential conveyancing professional fees have compressed to $700, $1,500, with disbursements charged separately on top. The fixed-fee structure creates a unit-economics problem: every additional search a conveyancer orders eats into their own margin, not the client's.