New Homes vs Established: $205,000 Ahead in 5 Years

Do new homes grow in value at the same rate as established dwellings? Our latest data-led study says no — and the gap is larger than most investors realise. Using 7.5 million sold records, we compared repeat sales of genuine turnkey new homes against established properties to measure capital growth properly, not just headlines. • 12,300 geocoded new-home sales were mapped across Australia • Median established house bought in 2020 and resold within five years: 14.6% p.a. • Median new build bought in 2020 and resold within five years: 7.8% p.a. • One in 12 new-home buyers lost money over five years, versus one in 250 for established • Over five years, the capital gains gap was nearly $400,000 in favour of established dwellings • New-build buyers paid about $13,000 a year better cash flow, but established still finished far ahead on wealth The lesson is simple: tax treatment can improve short-term cash flow, but it does not erase structural capital growth differences. If you want to build net worth, you need to buy the right asset in the right market — not just chase the newest product. Download our no-cost Top Five Markets Report 2026 → https://www.ripehouseadvisory.com.au/review Subscribe for more data-led Australian property analysis from Ripehouse Advisory. 0:00 New homes vs established: the core question 0:32 How we measured repeat-sales performance 1:35 Where new homes are being built 2:10 The 14.6% vs 7.8% result 3:05 Loss rates: one in 12 vs one in 250 4:10 Builder margins, rent and vacancy 5:05 Why the post-budget story still favours established 6:15 Five-year cash flow vs net worth 7:45 Why this is structural, not luck #AustralianProperty #PropertyInvesting #BuyersAgent #NewBuilds #EstablishedHomes #RipehouseAdvisory This video is general information only and not financial or investment advice. Consider your own circumstances and seek professional advice.

Do new homes grow in value at the same rate as established dwellings? And it's a question that I've been asked a lot lately. It has become a more important question to ask since the federal budget because the tax treatments have moved in favour of new homes for investment purposes. This is an article here from AFR newspaper recently. Property investors shift to new builds as first home buyers drop off. The question from this research and this video is going to be answering and investigating does that come at a cost and will this result in less capital gains and or income in the future. So the way that we did this study, it was looking at 7.5 million sold records and we looked at properties that had repeat purchases. So one thing that's difficult to do is if a property is a new home, it might be the land and then the builder does the building later. It's difficult to work out what the total cost of that property was at purchase. So to be accurate and to compare like for like, we looked at those new homes that sold as a package, as a new home, as a finished turnkey solution and then sold once again as a secondary sale after that. And we measured the capital gains in between those two points to get a very accurate measure of capital gains. It's the most accurate study that I have seen or has been done in the national marketplace for measuring performance of new versus established. We looked at GNAP, the national address database, 70 million registered addresses. We looked at when those new addresses were registered. Really important. So this is a bit of a snapshot, you know, visually where did Australia buy new in the last 12 months? So there were 12,300 geocoded sales. And remember, they are properties that were sold as a turnkey, not land and then the property built later. And it concentrates around where you would expect, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth fringes. We dive in here to Melbourne and you can see, you know, the popular areas that we all know and love for new home construction. The Willets, Donnybrooks, you know, Tarneets down to Officer, Clyde North. You know, they're the common targets for the new homes and you can see there's no real surprises there around where the new homes are being built. So this is the headline. The median established house purchased in 2020 and resold within five years compounded at 14.6% a year. Granted, it's been a good few years since 2020, but not so much for new homes. The median new build bought in the same year, 2020, grew at an average of 7.8% compounding. This is a major gap. Established properties over a full five-year sample period grew at nearly double the capital gains rate. Remember, this is properties that sold twice in that period. So there's no, you know, compensational trick here. These are legitimate new homes that have had multiple sales and we've measured the sales, the capital growth between those sales. This is the downside that nobody prices in because this is where it gets brutal. Over a five-year period, one in 12 people who purchased a new property lost money over five years. That's, you know, extreme levels of wealth loss. You compare that to established and it's one in 250. It is a 20 times difference or you are 20 times more likely to lose money over a full five-year period if you buy a new home. And that is the writing on the wall. That is, you know, alone the biggest red flag that I can see to really check yourself about thinking about the tax benefits, the tax treatm