Australian suburb price forecasts: can you trust them?

A record of 135 predictions and 135 winners

Some of our major competitors publish a record and it is perfect. Not strong, not better than the market. Perfect. Every suburb they recommended went on to work, over two years, across five states, with no exceptions listed anywhere on the page.

We are not naming them. Not because it would be hard to work out, since the claim sits on a public page anyone can read, but because this is not an argument with one firm. Several outfits in this market make claims of that shape and the shape is the problem, so the piece works whoever you have in mind.

If the predictions were that good, why would anyone sell them?

If you really could pick the right suburb every single time, what would you do with that?

You would not sell it. You would borrow against everything you own and buy. A person who has genuinely solved which suburbs rise does not spend their days writing reports for mums and dads at a few hundred dollars a time. The economics do not work. The moment a method is that good, the most profitable thing you can do with it is use it quietly.

What one perfect prediction is actually worth

Take our own edge, not a perfect one. Over the two years to June 2025 our top five suburbs grew about 12 points a year faster than the country. That is a real, measured, imperfect edge.

Put it to work on a single house. A $1,000,000 house beating the market by 12 points over a year is about $125,000 of extra equity, and at a 20% deposit that house needs $200,000 of your own money. One house. Not a portfolio, not a fund.

Now price the alternative. The evidence page in question counts 77 strategy sessions over 24 months. At a thousand dollars a session that is $77,000 across two years. At five thousand a session, which would be steep for this market, it is $385,000 across two years.

And 12 points is the floor here, not the comparison. That is what an admittedly imperfect list managed. A list that never misses would be worth far more than that, so every step up in accuracy makes selling it a stranger choice, not a more sensible one. If the record were real you would not stop at one house, and you would not need customers at all.

Someone would have handed them the money by now

The financial sector is many things, but it is not slow. If you could guarantee that rate of return, somebody would have written you a cheque already. That is the entire business of capital: finding the people who can do the thing and funding them.

There is an obvious objection here and it is a fair one. Property is slow and expensive to trade. Stamp duty, agents, settlement, months of waiting. You cannot deploy a hundred million dollars into suburbs next week the way you can into shares.

True, and it limits how fast anyone could scale. It does not explain the gap. You do not need to be fast to buy five houses over two years with a perfect list, and funds that buy residential property at scale already exist. Illiquidity slows the machine down. It does not explain choosing to sell the map instead of walking the route.

The $100 billion property funds are not buying it either

There is a whole industry whose entire job is to own property well. Australian real estate investment trusts manage more than $100 billion across about 50 listed trusts. One of them, Goodman Group, is worth around $61 billion on its own. These are not mums and dads. They have research teams, balance sheets and every incentive in the world to find an edge.

Over the ten years to June 2024 the A-REIT index returned about 9% a year. Respectable, and roughly what the broader Australian share market did over the same decade. Not the returns of an industry that has solved which locations rise.

To be fair to the comparison, most of those trusts hold offices, warehouses and shopping centres rather than houses, so it is not a like-for-like test of suburb picking. But the direction holds. The best-resourced, most-motivated property buyers in the country, with every advantage, earn ordinary returns. Nobody in that world is compounding at a rate that suggests location can be called perfectly.

In 2023 the experts predicted a 5% fall, against an actual rise of 8.1%

This is not theory. In How Reliable Are Property Experts?, we went back over fifteen years of published property forecasts and checked them against what happened. The worst of them was 2023, when the consensus said national prices would fall 5% and they rose 8.1% instead. A miss of 13.1 points, and in the direction that costs a buyer who waits.

Those are the same experts, in the same market, forecasting the same thing. If the industry as a whole misses by that much on the direction of the entire country, a claim to have never missed once on individual suburbs is not a small step beyond it.

Why predicting a suburb is genuinely hard

It is worth saying what the job actually involves, because the difficulty is not a secret and it is the reason the perfect claim falls over.

A suburb price is a thin, noisy thing. In a quiet suburb thirty houses might change hands in a year, and the middle price of those thirty moves as much on which houses sold as on what anything is worth. A run of renovated four-bedders one year and tired three-bedders the next will show you a fall that never happened. Before you can forecast anything you have to separate that from real movement, and plenty of published suburb numbers do not.

Then the things that actually move a suburb arrive on their own schedule and mostly from outside it. Interest rates. A rezoning. A new road or line. A big employer arriving or closing. Who is buying this year and what they can borrow. Some of that is visible in advance, some of it is decided in a meeting nobody has reported yet, and some of it is a national tide that lifts or drops nearly everything at once regardless of which suburb you chose.

So the honest version of this work is not picking winners. It is tilting the odds, measurably, and then being straight about how often the tilt did not pay.

Nobody gets an Australian suburb price forecast right every time

The whole country moves together more than most people realise, and our own numbers show how much. Over the two years below, a suburb picked at random grew 9% while the country grew 9%. Choosing the suburb bought you almost nothing. When credit loosens, nearly everything rises. When rates climb, nearly everything stalls. A forecaster picking suburbs is trying to beat that tide, not ride it, and nobody beats it every time.

Our own record says so. Over the two years from July 2023 to June 2025 we ranked every suburb in Australia every month. We made 209 calls in our top ten over that time. Of those, 55 finished behind the country. That is roughly one in four, and we publish them.

Our own predictions from July 2023 to June 2025, and what those suburbs did

Measured over the twelve months after each call, against what the country did over the same twelve months:

The bottom row is not a comparison with anybody else. It is the control on our own list: if you ignored the ranking and bought anywhere at all, you got 9%, level with the country. The point of showing it is the shape above it. Our advantage is real at the very top and it fades steadily as you go down, which is what a working forecast looks like. A record that is perfect all the way down has no shape at all, and that is the tell.

What one of our wrong calls looks like

A miss is not usually a disaster. The typical one finished about five points behind the country and the suburb still went up, just slower than the market. We named Newport in Melbourne fifth in December 2023 and it grew 4.7% over the following year while the country did 8.4%. We named Coffs Harbour in New South Wales sixth in November 2023 and it grew 5.5% against 8.2%. Both are real markets, 202 and 383 houses sold over the year in question, so those are not thin numbers moving on a handful of trades.

Neither of those would appear on a page claiming a perfect record. That is the whole point. A record with no misses in it has not been kept, it has been curated.

Why a company would publish a perfect record at all

Probably not because they set out to mislead. The likelier story is duller and more human. Customers ask for certainty, so certainty is what gets printed. Buyers want to be told that the thing they are about to spend a million dollars on is a sure thing, and a business that listens closely to its customers will end up saying exactly that back to them.

It helps that this corner of the market sits outside financial regulation. If a fund manager published a perfect track record in that headline form, the regulator would have something to say about it, and the fine print would not save them. Property advice is held to a far looser standard, and the fine print of almost any contract in this industry quietly disclaims the certainty the marketing promises.

Can you trust a suburb forecast? One question to ask first

Ask for their last two years. Not their best call, the whole list, with dates on it.

Most will not have one, because the list came out, the year passed, and a fresh list appeared as if the old one had never existed. The few who do produce one will hand you a record with no misses in it. Both answers tell you the same thing, and neither of them is the answer you want.

Where to see our predictions and how they went

We forecast every Australian suburb every month and have done since 2008. Every figure here comes from recorded sale prices and is measured against what the country did over the same period, so a strong year for the whole market does not flatter the result. The calls that went the wrong way are published beside the ones that worked.

See the whole two-year record, misses included