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David’s Take · Weekly Letter
One in Four.What the data actually says about Lower North Shore buyers. |
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| Dear Readers, | ||
| If you’ve been reading the headlines, you’d think buyers have disappeared. | ||
| They haven’t. They’ve become far more selective. | ||
| Let me be straight about the backdrop first. Sydney prices have been falling since late 2025. The Lower North Shore is not immune. | ||
| Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something. | ||
| But a falling market is not a dead market. This year the Lower North Shore patch has recorded 498 house sales worth $2.28 billion, at a median of $3,990,000. | ||
| Buyers are turning up with finance approved and money ready. They are simply refusing to pay the wrong number. | ||
| The proof is in what happened to every listing this year. | ||
| One in four completed campaigns ended in withdrawal, not a sale. | ||
| I track every house listing across my 20 suburbs. Here is where the 839 listings from this year stand. | ||
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| 498 sold. 187 are still on the market. And 158 were withdrawn. | ||
| Look at the withdrawals another way. Of the 656 campaigns that have finished, 158 ended with the vendor pulling the property off the market. That is one in four. | ||
| Withdrawal is what wishful thinking looks like in the data. The 498 sales prove the buyers exist. The 158 withdrawals prove they won’t chase the wrong price. | ||
| Only 16% of sales happened under the hammer. 87% of this year’s sales came through an auction campaign. But look at when the deal was actually done. | ||
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| Nearly half of auction-campaign sales were done before auction day. Well-priced homes attract buyers who would rather pay fairly now than gamble on the day. | ||
| And here is the number most agents won’t show you. More homes sold after auction day than at auction. In most cases that means the property passed in, the market delivered its verdict in public, and the price was renegotiated afterwards. Usually downward. | ||
| The auction hasn’t died. It has become the moment the market tells you what it thinks of your price. | ||
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Sold in 30 days. Or sitting for 75 and counting.
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| The clearest evidence of selectivity is time. | ||
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| Homes that sold this year did so in a median of 30 days. The homes still on the market have been sitting for a median of 73 days. And their clocks are still running. | ||
| Here is the detail worth noticing. The median asking price of unsold stock is $4.0 million. The median sale price is $3.990 million. On paper, sellers aren’t asking crazy money. The gap is in the specific home, its presentation, and its price position against direct competition. Buyers aren’t rejecting the market. They’re rejecting individual propositions. | ||
| One more number. 132 of the 843 listings on the market were first listed before 2026. That is 16% of visible stock carrying last year’s price expectations into this year’s market. | ||
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David’s Take
The market isn’t repricing loudly. It’s repricing quietly. The median sale price has barely moved. Down about 1% in eight weeks. If you only watched that number, you’d think nothing was happening.
Watch the other numbers instead.
Homes that sell are still selling in 30 days. That figure hasn’t moved all winter. But the homes still sitting have gone from 38 days on market to 75. The gap has doubled in eight weeks.
Price cuts are outrunning price rises two and a half to one. Ten vendors a week are withdrawing. Auction bookings have halved since May.
That’s what a correction looks like when nobody wants to say the word. It happens in time, not headlines.
The lesson hasn’t changed. Price right, sell in 30 days. Price wrong, and the market won’t argue with you. It will just wait you out.
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What this means for you
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David’s Take
Forty auctions are booked across the next five weeks, against 187 homes on the market. That is a 21% auction-to-listing ratio. In late May it was 46%. It has more than halved in eight weeks.
Two things are happening at once. Winter is slowing new listings, just 8 launched this week. And vendors who do list are quietly stepping away from the auction method, because a public pass in in this market is a verdict nobody wants delivered in front of the neighbours.
For sellers, less competition at auction cuts both ways. Fewer auctions means yours gets noticed. But it only works with a price the market has already told us it will pay.
If you’re thinking of selling, this market will still reward you. But it rewards three things only. The honest number. A home presented properly. And a campaign built for the conditions we’re in, not the conditions we wish we were in.
Get those right and you’re in the group that sells in 30 days, often before auction.
Get them wrong and you join the 75-day group. Or the one in four.
The market hasn’t stopped rewarding quality. It has stopped rewarding wishful thinking.
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| If you want to know which side of that line your home sits on, call me. I’ll show you the evidence either way. | ||
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Lower North Shore Market Report — Download Free
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Northbridge Interactive Map
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Lower North Shore
140 Sailors Bay Road, Northbridge NSW 2063
Sources: Team Howe market data, week ending 13 July 2026. Figures are houses only, Lower North Shore. Provided in good faith and may have changed since publication. Interested parties should make their own independent enquiries before relying on any information herein.
© Raine & Horne Lower North Shore. You are receiving this because you have previously been in touch with our office about Lower North Shore property. |
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