Property

Australia's national Home Value Index fell 0.7 per cent in July, the largest monthly decline since December 2022, according to Cotality's August 2026 housing chart pack. The index covers a $12.4 trillion housing stock spread across 11.5 million dwellings.

Australia's Home Value Index fell 0.7 per cent in July, the largest monthly decline since December 2022, according to Cotality data published on 14 August. Brisbane values dropped 0.6 per cent over the month and Adelaide fell 0.2 per cent.

The weighted average final clearance rate across the combined capital cities hit 48.9 per cent for the week ending 16 August 2026, down 20.9 percentage points from 69.8 per cent recorded in the same week a year earlier.

Three sets of numbers are now circulating about what Labor's housing tax reforms will do to rents. They disagree by an order of magnitude, and the gap tells you almost everything about what each forecaster is assuming. The assumptions buried inside each figure are doing most of the work.

Darwin recorded the strongest annual rental growth of any Australian capital city at 10.4 per cent in July 2026, putting the median there at $725 a week. Perth followed at 8.1 per cent and Hobart at 8.0 per cent, both well ahead of the national pace.

Stirling Property Funds has sold the McGraths Hill Home large-format retail centre in Sydney's north-west to boutique fund manager Centennial for $66.8 million, locking in a 21 per cent gain on an 18-month hold.

AUSTRAC says its Fintel Alliance has uncovered coordinated mortgage fraud across 10 major banks, with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in suspected fraudulent loans, most of them on Sydney properties.

Self-managed superannuation funds have been able to borrow under limited recourse borrowing arrangements, or LRBAs, to buy investment property since the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 first permitted the practice.