People call property investment risky, and we understand why. It involves a lot of money, the market moves in ways that feel unpredictable, and there’s always a headline warning that a crash is around the corner.
But 55 years of data show that Australian property has never recorded a decade of negative growth.
What the numbers say
Sydney house prices in 1970 averaged around $18,700. Adjusted for inflation, that’s approximately $155,000 in today’s dollars.
By 1980 the average was $76,500, about $330,000 in today’s money. It was $194,000 by 1990 and $287,000 by 2000. The pattern holds in every decade, through recessions, interest rate spikes, global financial crises and pandemics.
There was no decade of negative growth through the 1970s inflation crisis, the early 1990s recession, the GFC or COVID.
Short-term noise and long-term signal
Property values do fall. Individual years, markets and assets can and do go backwards. Values dropped in some suburbs during the GFC, and the rate rises of 2022 and 2023 caused corrections in certain segments.
The distinction that matters is that short-term volatility is a different thing from long-term risk.
If your investment horizon is five years, you’re exposed to that volatility. If it’s ten years or more, which it should be for a serious property strategy, the historical record is remarkably consistent.
Investors who lost money in property almost always fall into one of three groups: they bought the wrong asset, they bought in the wrong location, or they needed to sell at the wrong time. None of those are failures of property as an asset class. They’re failures of strategy and selection.
What this means in practice
When a Stonehhart client asks us whether now is a good time to buy, our honest answer is that the data suggests there has never been a bad decade in which to buy well-selected Australian property. That has held for more than half a century.
When to buy matters less than what you buy, where and why, and whether your strategy is built to hold through the short-term noise on the way to long-term growth.
That’s the conversation we have in every Sit Meeting.
Ready to build a strategy that works across market cycles? Book a free Sit Meeting. There’s no obligation.
