Rates Rise! Which Price Point does the hike hit hardest?

Rate hikes are not hitting every Australian suburb equally. The data shows the real dividing line is price point: above $1.5 million, 70% of suburbs are lower, while affordable markets continue to rise. Our 12 years of monthly data reveals a property market split that national medians hide: → Sydney house prices fell 14.7% during the last hiking cycle; Perth fell just 2.4% and recovered within four months. → 58% of liquid suburbs are higher than they were at the March peak, despite the national median being down 2.7%. → Suburbs above $1.5 million are 70% lower, while suburbs under $500,000 rose 8.5% in the first part of 2026. → Rents rose in 77% of suburbs, with the median increase at 5.9%. → Only 60 suburbs currently combine yields of at least 5% with vacancy at or below 2%; just 27 have also kept rising. → Bankstown, Swan Hill and Chinchilla emerged from the latest filter, subject to further due diligence. For investors and homebuyers, the key question is not simply which state to buy in. It is whether the suburb sits in a resilient price band, has genuine rental demand and enough sales liquidity. This is where professional research and a buyers agent can turn market noise into a repeatable filter. Download our no-cost Top Five Markets Report 2026 → https://ripehouseadvisory.com.au/review Subscribe to Ripehouse Advisory for more data-led Australian property analysis. #AustralianProperty #PropertyInvesting #BuyersAgent #PropertyMarket #RateHikes This video is general information only and not financial or investment advice. Consider your own circumstances and seek professional advice.

Last time the RBA hiked like this, Sydney house prices fell 14.7% in 10 months. Perth fell 2.4% and it was back at its peak just four months later. This is the same country, same rate hikes, two completely different endings. Today the cash rate goes to 4.6, the highest since 2011 and I'm going to show you from our own 12 years of monthly data exactly what happened to every state last time, whether it's repeating right now and stay for this, the one number that decides which side of the split your suburb lands on. It isn't in the state that you live in. Now here's why this matters more than the headline rate. The move itself is a quarter of a percent but for the average wage borrower the three hikes before it already cut borrowing capacity by $11,000, 9%. Today it takes another $11,200. Every half a percent on the rate is roughly $58,000 of loan on a $500,000 mortgage. That's the mechanism. The buyer at the top of their budget just lost a tenth of their budget. Remember this phrase, the top of budget, because it's the whole second half of this video and it's really important to grasp. Now every outlet this week quoted one number. The national median is down 2.7% since the March peak and that's true and useless because in that number 42% of suburbs are lower but at the same time since March of this year 58% are actually higher off flat. So we can see that because our data warehouse tracks 2,200 suburbs with enough liquidity, at least 30 real sales in each year, so we remove the thin markets, the noise, and we focus on those real liquid markets, just over 2,000 of them, we can see what is actually really happening in the market. So even though the national headlines are saying property prices have gone backwards since March, we know that 58% of them have actually grown in value since March and that's the real story. So commentators, they quote the index, we count the suburbs and when you count the first question becomes obvious. Is this playing out the same way that it did last time in 2022-2023? So let's go back to that last hiking cycle, May 2022 onwards. Now using our own state data series, New South Wales fell 14.7% peak to trough. The ACT 13.6, Victoria 12.9, the Territory 12. Then a gap, Tasmania, Queensland and then WA. These were all in a separate league compared to those top four and South Australia didn't fall at all. The rate hikes were national, the damage wasn't. And here's the open question, how long did each of these falls last? Because for two of these states, the answer is it still hasn't ended since 2022. Here's the answer, WA and South Australia back at their peak within four months, Queensland 13. New South Wales took two years to see its 2022 prices again. The Territory 36, Tasmania 41 and Victoria and the ACT, they still haven't caught up. Melbourne's house median today is still nearly 10% below December 21. Canberra's 11%. Two states went into the hiking cycle and four and a half years later still haven't come out. So a rate hike is not a national event, it's a local one. And the difference between four months and forever is the entire game that we need to look at. And this is the part that the fear headlines never talk about. The state that barely dipped in 2022 are the ones that ran the hardest afterwards. WA house median prices is 74% above its 2022 peak. South Australia 45, Queensland 39, the Territory 26. So for a Perth buyer in late 2022, the correction was 2.4% and it lasted three months. Waiting for it to be