By Aus Investment Properties
Australian Residential Property: Q2 2026
Postcode level capital growth, long term performance and vacancy analysis
Reporting Perion Q1-Q2 2026
Report Summary
Australia's postcode level residential markets delivered another strong year of capital growth to Q1 2026, but the strength was far from uniform. Across the 899 postcode markets that passed our market-depth guardrail (at least 30 settled sales in both quarters), the median house market recorded 12.9% capital growth over the year and the median unit market 11.2% capital growth. Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory carried the momentum, while Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra grew at a much more modest pace. Rental markets remain tight: half of all eligible postcodes recorded a vacancy rate under 1%, although vacancy has eased slightly since the previous quarter. As always, a strong growth figure on its own should not be treated as a standalone buy signal: capital growth and rental demand should be assessed together.
- Capital growth: the median eligible house market posted 12.9% one-year capital growth and the median unit market 11.2%; roughly one in ten eligible markets went backwards, so the national medians conceal genuine dispersion.
- Vacancy: the median postcode vacancy rate is 1.00% (April to June 2026 average), up modestly from about 0.90% in the prior quarter, and 50% of eligible postcodes sit under 1%, which suggests rental-market pressure remains widespread.
- Houses versus units: houses lead on capital growth nationally over both horizons (median 10-year annualised capital growth of 7.1% for houses versus 3.6% for units), but units out-grew houses over the past year in QLD and WA.
- Recent momentum leaders: the strongest eligible one-year capital growth markets cluster in Perth's northern corridor (postcodes 6028 and 6027, both near 38% capital growth for houses) and regional WA units (Bunbury, postcode 6230, 39.2% capital growth), figures that warrant scepticism and require additional due diligence.
- Long-term leaders: south east Queensland dominates the 10-year annualised capital growth tables, led by the Moreton Bay islands (postcode 4184, 19.5% annualised) and the Coomera to Pimpama corridor (postcode 4209, 15.0% annualised), both of which also posted strong recent capital growth and are worth further investigation.
- Main takeaway: the markets that combine positive recent capital growth, a solid 10-year capital growth track record and tight vacancy are concentrated in Queensland and Western Australia; the balanced tables in Section 6 are the best screening starting point, not a shortlist of recommendations.
Introduction
This report is the quarterly postcode level review of Australian residential investment markets prepared by Aus Investment Properties. Its purpose is to give investors a disciplined, data-driven view of where capital growth and rental demand currently sit, and to do so with guardrails that strip out statistically thin or extreme results before they can mislead.
Three measures are used throughout. One-year capital growth (Q1 2025 to Q1 2026) captures recent momentum. Ten-year annualised capital growth (2015 to 2025) captures the long-term track record and smooths out single-cycle noise. The vacancy rate (the April to June 2026 monthly average for each postcode) is our indicator of rental demand: a low vacancy rate suggests rental-market pressure, while an elevated one points to softer tenant demand or new supply. No single measure is sufficient on its own; capital growth and rental demand should be assessed together.
All figures are postcode level. A postcode can span several suburbs with quite different characteristics, so nothing in this report should be read as suburb level analysis. Vacancy is also postcode level only and is not split by houses and units. Growth percentages throughout this report are capital growth figures, not rental yields.
National market snapshot
The four charts below summarise the eligible universe: the 899 postcode markets (728 postcodes; 627 house markets and 272 unit markets) that passed the 30-settled-sales depth guardrail in both quarters and were not removed by the 40% extreme-growth cap.
Median 1-year capital growth (Q1 2025 to Q1 2026) by state and property type, eligible postcode markets. Houses in navy, units in aqua.
The one-year picture is a tale of two economies. Western Australia leads the nation with median capital growth of 24.8% for house markets and 31.1% for unit markets, followed by the Northern Territory (23.1% houses) and Queensland (18.6% houses, 22.4% units). Tasmania and South Australia also posted strong mid-teen medians. By contrast, New South Wales (9.2% houses), Victoria (7.9% houses) and the ACT (9.5% houses, with unit markets marginally negative at -0.8%) grew at less than half the pace of the resource-state leaders. Medians above 20% in any state deserve a sceptical read: growth at that pace is rarely sustained, and some of it reflects smaller capital city and regional markets catching up from a lower base.
The 10-year view reorders the field. Queensland (8.8% houses) and Tasmania (8.5% houses) hold the strongest long-term medians, with South Australia close behind, while Western Australia's long-term house median of 5.6% is middling despite its current momentum: a reminder that WA's present surge follows a long flat stretch. The Northern Territory's 10-year medians (1.2% houses, -1.2% units) show that today's strong NT momentum sits on a weak decade, so NT figures in the leader tables warrant extra due diligence. Nationally, houses have out-compounded units over the decade in every state.
Median vacancy rate by state, postcode level (April to June 2026 monthly average). Vacancy is a single postcode level series, not split by property type.
Vacancy remains tight almost everywhere. The Northern Territory (0.32%), Tasmania (0.50%), Western Australia (0.66%) and South Australia (0.70%) have median postcode vacancy well under 1%, while New South Wales (1.15%), Victoria (1.13%) and the ACT (1.09%) sit only modestly above it. Note that vacancy is postcode level and a single series per postcode; it cannot distinguish house and unit rental conditions.
Share of eligible postcode markets with an average vacancy rate below 1%, by state (April to June 2026).
The share of postcodes under 1% vacancy makes the same point more starkly: every eligible NT postcode, 93% of Tasmanian postcodes and 77% of WA postcodes are below 1%, against 38% in New South Wales and 36% in Victoria. Tight vacancy across so much of the country suggests rental-market pressure will remain a feature of the investment landscape through 2026, particularly outside the two largest capitals.
Capital growth leaders
The four tables below rank the top 20 eligible markets by one-year and 10-year annualised capital growth, for houses and units separately. Where a postcode appears in both the one-year and 10-year tables (for example postcode 4184 on the Moreton Bay islands, or 4209 in the Coomera to Pimpama corridor), recent momentum is backed by a long-term track record, which is worth further investigation. Where a market shows strong recent capital growth but a flat decade (for example postcode 3039 Moonee Ponds units, 37.9% over the year against 0.8% annualised over ten years), the momentum has no track record behind it and requires additional due diligence. Several of the strongest one-year figures also sit in broad rural or island postcodes where conditions vary widely across localities; these should not be treated as a standalone buy signal. Min Qtr Sales, the lower of the two quarterly settled-sales counts, is shown as the market-depth indicator: a higher figure means stronger market depth behind the growth estimate.
Table 4.1: Top 20 house markets by 1-year capital growth
Table 4.2: Top 20 unit markets by 1-year capital growth
Table 4.3: Top 20 house markets by 10-year annualised capital growth
Table 4.4: Top 20 unit markets by 10-year annualised capital growth
Rental pressure markets
The tables below rank eligible postcodes by vacancy rate, with ties broken by one-year capital growth. Each postcode appears once; where a postcode has both an eligible house and unit market, the property type shown is the one with the stronger one-year capital growth. Because vacancy is a rental measure that settled-sales counts do not validate, these tables end at the vacancy column. Tight-vacancy postcodes, several recording effectively zero average vacancy across the quarter, suggest sustained rental-market pressure; the high-vacancy list is a caution flag, with postcode 3335 (Rockbank and Thornhill Park growth corridor, 15.2% vacancy) and 4659 (Burrum Heads, 9.1%) illustrating how new supply or holiday-market dynamics can leave landlords competing for tenants even where capital growth remains positive.
Table 5.1: Top 20 lowest-vacancy postcodes
Table 5.2: Top 20 highest-vacancy postcodes
Balanced growth and rental demand markets
The Balanced Score is a screening tool, not a recommendation. From the eligible universe we keep only markets with positive one-year capital growth, positive 10-year annualised capital growth and a vacancy rate at or below the national median of 1.00%; 415 markets qualified this quarter. Within that pool, one-year capital growth, 10-year capital growth and inverted vacancy are each min-max scaled, then combined as 35% one-year, 35% ten-year and 30% inverted vacancy, and expressed out of 100. A high score therefore indicates a market where recent momentum, a long-term capital growth record and tight rental conditions currently coincide; it says nothing about price point, yield, stock quality or forward risk, all of which require additional due diligence.
Queensland dominates both lists. Postcode 4209 (Coomera, Pimpama and Upper Coomera) tops the house table with strong scores on all three legs and exceptional market depth (250 settled sales in the thinner quarter), while Townsville's rural fringe (4816) and the Inverell district (2360) follow on tighter vacancy; both are broad regional postcodes that warrant extra due diligence. On the unit side, Brisbane's affordable south west (4077 Inala and Durack) and the Beenleigh corridor (4207) lead, combining near-30% one-year capital growth with sub-0.7% vacancy.
Table 6.1: Top 20 balanced house markets
Table 6.2: Top 20 balanced unit markets
Watchlist markets
These three tables are monitoring lists, not opportunity lists. They isolate markets where the signals disagree, and disagreement is exactly where assumptions should be tested before capital is committed. The thresholds are data driven and recomputed each quarter on the eligible universe: tight vacancy is the 25th percentile (0.68% this quarter), high vacancy is the 75th percentile (1.53%), a strong long-term record is the 75th percentile of 10-year annualised capital growth (8.1%), and weak recent momentum is one-year capital growth at or below a fixed 2.0%.
Table 7.1: Rental pressure without momentum (vacancy at or below 0.68% and 1-year capital growth at or below 2.0%)
Sixteen markets combine very tight rental conditions with flat or negative recent capital growth. Tight vacancy suggests rental-market pressure and can precede price growth, but it can also persist for years in small regional markets without translating into capital growth; treat these as markets to watch, not to chase.
Table 7.2: Cooling long-term performers (10-year annualised capital growth at or above 8.1% and 1-year capital growth at or below 2.0%)
Sixteen markets with a top-quartile decade have stalled over the past year, including Officer (3809) and Noosaville (4566). A strong decade followed by a flat year can mark a pause, a peak or a rotation of demand; the direction is not knowable from two data points, which is precisely why these sit on a watchlist.
Table 7.3: High-vacancy risk (vacancy at or above 1.53% and 1-year capital growth at or below 2.0%)
Forty five markets combine elevated vacancy with weak recent capital growth, the least comfortable pairing in this report; the table lists the 20 with the highest vacancy. Softer tenant demand alongside stalling prices increases holding risk, and any exposure here should be underpinned by asset-specific and locality-specific work rather than postcode level figures.
House versus unit comparison
For postcodes with both an eligible house and an eligible unit market, the tables below show the largest performance gaps in each direction, over one year and over ten years. A positive Diff means houses outperformed units; a negative Diff means units outperformed houses. The one-year gaps can be striking: in Leichhardt and Lilyfield (2040) houses gained 15.2% capital growth while units fell 17.1%, a 32.4 point gap, while in Noosa Heads (4567) units gained 25.4% against a 5.3% fall for houses. Gaps this wide are often composition effects, differences in the stock transacting from one year to the next, rather than clean price divergence, and they should not be treated as a standalone buy signal for the lagging or leading segment. The 10-year tables are the more reliable read on structural preference between the two property types within a postcode.
Table 8.1: Largest 1-year gaps where houses outperformed units
Table 8.2: Largest 1-year gaps where units outperformed houses
Table 8.3: Largest 10-year gaps where houses outperformed units
Table 8.4: Largest 10-year gaps where units outperformed houses
Investor implications
The momentum map and the track-record map are different maps. Western Australia and the Northern Territory own the one-year capital growth tables, but their 10-year medians are middling to weak. Queensland is the only state that ranks highly on both horizons, which is why it dominates the balanced tables. Investors extrapolating WA's 20% to 30% medians forward should remember that the state's decade-long annualised figure is 5.6% for houses: fast years and flat stretches average out. Extreme single-year growth, particularly the near-40% figures at the top of the leader tables, warrants scepticism and requires additional due diligence before it informs any decision.
Vacancy is doing a lot of work in the current market. With half the eligible postcodes under 1% vacancy, tight rental conditions are close to the national norm rather than a point of difference. That cuts two ways: low vacancy alone is a weak differentiator when it is so widespread, but the high-vacancy tail (Section 5 and Table 7.3) is genuinely informative, because elevated vacancy now stands out against a tight national backdrop. Vacancy also edged up from roughly 0.90% to 1.00% at the median over the past quarter, a small move worth monitoring rather than acting on.
Alignment is the strongest single screen in this report. Markets appearing across the one-year tables, the 10-year tables and the balanced tables, such as the Coomera corridor and parts of Brisbane's affordable middle ring, are worth further investigation because three independent measures agree. Conversely, momentum without a track record (Section 4) and track record without momentum (Table 7.2) are both single-signal stories. Postcode level figures can also mask wide variation between localities, especially in broad rural postcodes, so suburb and asset level work remains essential. Capital growth and rental demand should be assessed together, and neither replaces professional advice on an investor's individual circumstances.
Executive summary
The year to Q1 2026 rewarded the smaller capitals and the regions. Across the 899 eligible postcode markets, median one-year capital growth reached 12.9% for houses and 11.2% for units, with the distribution skewed heavily toward Western Australia (24.8% house median, 31.1% unit median), the Northern Territory, Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia. New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT recorded single-digit medians, and ACT unit markets slipped marginally backwards. Around one in ten eligible markets recorded negative capital growth for the year, a useful reminder that a strong national median is not a universal experience.
Over ten years the ranking inverts in important ways. Queensland (8.8% annualised house median) and Tasmania (8.5%) hold the strongest long-term records, while Western Australia's decade figure of 5.6% shows its current boom is recovering lost ground, and the Northern Territory's near-flat decade urges caution about reading its current momentum as trend. Houses have out-compounded units over the decade in every state, most sharply in New South Wales and Victoria, although units out-grew houses over the past year in Queensland and Western Australia, led by affordable metropolitan unit markets such as Inala (4077) and Beenleigh (4207) in Brisbane and Bunbury (6230) in WA.
Rental conditions remain historically tight. The median eligible postcode vacancy rate for the April to June 2026 quarter is 1.00%, half of all eligible postcodes sit below 1%, and in the Northern Territory every eligible postcode does. Vacancy nonetheless drifted up from about 0.90% in the January to March quarter, and the high-vacancy tail includes growth-corridor postcodes such as Rockbank and Thornhill Park (3335, 15.2%) where supply is running ahead of tenant demand. The watchlists in Section 7 flag 16 tight-vacancy markets without price momentum, 16 strong-decade markets that have stalled, and 45 markets pairing elevated vacancy with weak recent capital growth, of which the 20 highest-vacancy are tabled.
The quarter's clearest signal is alignment. A relatively small set of markets, concentrated in south east Queensland's growth corridors and Brisbane's affordable middle ring, combine positive recent capital growth, a top-tier 10-year record, tight vacancy and genuine market depth. Those markets top the balanced tables in Section 6 and are worth further investigation. Everything else in the leader tables carries at least one caveat, whether a missing track record, a thin market just above the depth guardrail, a broad rural postcode or extreme single-year growth, and requires additional due diligence before any capital decision.
Methodology and data guardrails
Data inputs. Four datasets were supplied for this quarter: (1) raw one-year capital growth per postcode and property type comparing Q1 2026 with Q1 2025, including settled-sales counts for both quarters; (2) 10-year annualised capital growth per postcode and property type (2015 to 2025); (3) monthly postcode level vacancy data (listings, dwellings and vacancy rate); and (4) the public Australian postcodes reference used to attach localities and states. Postcodes were standardised to integers, property types to House and Unit, and vacancy converted to a percentage.
Vacancy period. The vacancy file supplied covers the three months April to June 2026; each postcode's vacancy rate in this report is the simple average of those three monthly rates. The prior quarter's file (January to March 2026, median 0.90% across the same postcodes) was retained as a reference point for the quarter-on-quarter comparison noted in the commentary but is not otherwise used in the tables. Vacancy is postcode level only and is not split by property type.
Market-depth guardrail (30 settled sales). Only postcode markets with at least 30 settled sales in both quarters (Q1 2025 and Q1 2026) are retained; the binding constraint is the thinner quarter, reported in the tables as Min Qtr Sales. This depth rule substitutes for a minimum-dwellings rule: no dwelling-count field is supplied with the growth data, and settled-sales counts are a stronger, direct measure of transaction depth than dwelling stock in any case. The guardrail removed 2,276 of 3,190 raw postcode markets, leaving 914; one further market was dropped because it had no matching 10-year history.
Extreme-growth cap (40%). Nine postcodes recorded one-year capital growth above 40% in at least one property type: 2021, 3020, 4114, 4225, 4802, 6014, 6100, 6101 and 6163. All rows for those postcodes (14 markets) were excluded from the headline rankings, every table and every chart. Growth at that pace within a single year is more often a symptom of compositional change or a thin prior base than of underlying appreciation, and including it would distort the leader tables. The remaining 899 markets across 728 postcodes form the eligible universe.
Watchlist thresholds (this quarter's values). Computed on the eligible universe: tight vacancy is the 25th percentile, 0.68%; high vacancy is the 75th percentile, 1.53%; a strong long-term record is the 75th percentile of 10-year annualised capital growth, 8.1%; weak recent momentum is a fixed threshold of one-year capital growth at or below 2.0%. The balanced-score pool additionally requires vacancy at or below the national median of 1.00%, and 415 markets qualified.
Locality cleaning. From the postcodes reference, rows typed Post Office Boxes or LVR were dropped. Locality names containing (as whole words) DC, BC, PO, MALL, PLAZA, CENTRE or SHOPPING, or the phrases POST OFFICE, BUSINESS CENTRE or DELIVERY CENTRE, were treated as non-residential and removed; whole-word matching ensures genuine names such as Mallacoota are untouched. Names were then smart title-cased (including Mc and O' prefixes), de-duplicated case-insensitively, and up to five key localities retained per postcode in the reference's own order. Each postcode's state is the most common state in the reference, with a postcode-range fallback where a postcode is absent.
Data attributions. The supplied growth datasets carry the following required acknowledgements. New South Wales: contains property sales information provided under licence from the Valuer General New South Wales; SQM Research Pty Ltd is authorised as a Property Sales Information Provider by the Valuer General of New South Wales. Queensland: © State of Queensland (Department of Resources) 2024; the State gives no warranty in relation to the data (including accuracy, reliability, completeness, currency or suitability) and accepts no liability (including without limitation, liability in negligence) for any loss, damage or costs (including consequential damage) relating to any use of the data; data must not be used for direct marketing or be used in breach of the privacy laws.
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