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Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →More than half of the residential valuers at CBRE now describe demand in their local market as soft or very limited, and the buyers still turning up are mostly first home buyers. Those are the central findings of the firm's Residential Valuer Insights survey for the September quarter of 2026, announced in a media release on 14 September.
The survey has a Queensland sting in it. First home buyers are the most active group in the country, yet CBRE reports their activity is lowest in Brisbane Metro and Brisbane Outer Metro. At the same time valuers from Ipswich to the Gold Coast describe investors, the group that helped drive south-east Queensland's long run, as largely absent. For an owner about to sell, the question the survey answers is not what a home is worth. It is who is left to buy it.
CBRE, Residential Valuer Insights Q3 2026: 169 valuers across Australia, surveyed in the first two weeks of August; media release 14 September 2026.
What the survey found
CBRE asks its residential valuers each quarter what they are seeing on the ground. The valuers inspect homes for lenders and speak to selling agents daily, so their answers are observations more than forecasts. The September quarter edition draws on 169 responses collected in the first two weeks of August.
The share reporting soft or very limited demand, 56 per cent, is more than double the level of the June quarter survey. According to the report it is the first time since 2024 that a majority of valuers have given a negative reading. A further 36 per cent describe demand as moderate or balanced.
Kat Hale, CBRE's national director of residential valuations, summed up the result in the release: "Across Australia, valuers are seeing demand soften." She added that activity continues, particularly from first home buyers, while investor demand has slowed.
Related readPropTrack counts 22 per cent more new Brisbane listings than last JuneOn the cause, the valuers are unusually specific. Asked for the biggest influence on their market, 41 per cent name the changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing announced in the May federal Budget. Interest rates come second at 31 per cent and affordability third at 14 per cent. The share of valuers who expect the capital gains changes to push prices down has risen to 83 per cent, from 50 per cent in the June quarter, though most of them expect falls of 5 per cent or less. Almost two-thirds expect prices to fall over the next 12 months.
Who is still buying
The survey's breakdown of buyers is the part that bears most directly on a sale campaign.
Source: CBRE Residential Valuer Insights Q3 2026, national results. Valuers could name more than one group.
CBRE says the reading for local investors is the lowest since the start of 2024. Interstate investors, who were a feature of the Brisbane market through the years when it was cheaper than Sydney and Melbourne and rising faster, are named by fewer than one valuer in five.
Official lending figures point the same way for Queensland. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland's market report for the June quarter, published on 31 August, recorded a 10.1 per cent fall in new loan commitments to property investors in the State over the quarter, against a fall of 1.2 per cent for first home buyers.
The Queensland readings
The regional detail in the report is where Queensland departs from the national picture. CBRE finds first home buyer activity highest in Melbourne Metro, the Australian Capital Territory and outer Sydney. It is lowest in Brisbane Metro and Brisbane Outer Metro.
Related readQueensland holds a third of Australia's distressed listings, SQM saysThe survey does not explain the gap, and the report offers no single reason. What it shows is an overlap that matters to sellers: the buyer group holding up the market elsewhere is at its thinnest in Brisbane, at the moment the investors who would otherwise fill the space have withdrawn.
The valuers' own comments, published in the report without their names, describe what that looks like from the footpath. A valuer in South Brisbane reports "fewer people at open homes, longer selling periods and fewer buyers." A second South Brisbane valuer observes that demand had been so strong that enough remains to hold the market for now, and warns that this could change as listing numbers rise.
On the Gold Coast, a valuer relays what agents are saying: a significant reduction in investor enquiry, mainly affecting the market below $1,200,000. On the Sunshine Coast the local market is described as resilient but "more traditional", with fewer buyers and longer sale periods. The report's summary places both coasts among the areas where demand is more balanced than in the largest capitals.
Ipswich draws the most pointed comments. One valuer there reports growing marketing periods and very little investor interest in existing duplexes, dual-occupancy homes and townhouses. Another notes that the premiums buyers paid to secure a property six months ago "have now disappeared."
Why the type of home matters
Read together, the comments say something a single demand percentage cannot. The slowdown is not falling evenly on every Queensland listing. It is falling hardest on the homes investors used to buy.
Related readFrom today, Queensland sellers must prove who they are to their agentA duplex or a dual-occupancy house in Ipswich is priced on its rent. Its natural buyer is an investor, and a first home buyer is seldom looking for two dwellings on one title. When investors step back, the pool of buyers for that kind of property shrinks far more than the pool for a three-bedroom house a young family might live in. The same logic applies to the Gold Coast comment: an apartment or townhouse under $1,200,000 that would have drawn investor enquiry a year ago now depends more heavily on people who intend to live in it.
The valuers do not say such homes cannot be sold. They say the marketing periods are growing. For a seller, the practical meaning is that the description, presentation and price of an investor-style property are now being judged by a different audience. An owner-occupier asks about the kitchen and the school. An investor asks about the yield.
The same suburb can hold two different markets this spring
Valuers describe homes suited to first home buyers as still finding buyers, while investor-style stock such as duplexes and townhouses waits longer. A suburb's average selling time can hide both.
More listings expected
The valuers were also asked what they expect to happen to the number of homes for sale. Fifty-five per cent expect a slight increase in listings and 7 per cent a significant one, which means 62 per cent expect more stock. Another 27 per cent expect listings to hold steady and 11 per cent expect a decline.
That expectation sits alongside what the counts already show. Cotality's September chart pack, published on 10 September, put Brisbane's median time on market at 35 days over the three months to August, up from 19 days a year earlier, and the city's median vendor discount at 4.2 per cent, up from 2.8 per cent. If the valuers are right about supply, sellers who list later in the season will meet more competition than those already on the market, with the same reduced pool of buyers to share.
Related readSelling a Queensland home as an executor or under a power of attorneyWhat the survey cannot tell a seller
A survey of valuers is a reading of sentiment among professionals, and it has limits worth keeping in view. It was taken in the first half of August, a month before its release. It reports how many valuers hold a view, not how much prices or sales have moved; those are measured elsewhere. And the Queensland comments are individual observations from particular offices, chosen by CBRE to illustrate the results.
The expectation of price falls also needs its qualifier. Almost two-thirds of the valuers expect prices to be lower in 12 months, and most of those who foresee an effect from the tax changes put it at 5 per cent or less. That is an expectation, held by people whose work makes them cautious, and it is not a forecast any of them is bound to.
What the survey adds to the price indexes and listing counts is a description of the people on the other side of the transaction. Six months ago a Brisbane seller could expect owner-occupiers, local investors and interstate investors to compete for the same home. CBRE's valuers are describing a market where one of those three groups does most of the buying, and where that group is scarcer in Brisbane than anywhere else they looked.
What comes next
CBRE runs the survey quarterly, so the next edition will be taken during the December quarter and will show whether spring brought investors back or kept them away. The tax changes the valuers cite were announced in May and have dominated their answers for two surveys running.
Between now and then, the monthly counts from Cotality and SQM Research will show whether the extra listings most valuers expect have arrived. For Queensland sellers the survey's message is about audience more than price. Which buyers are still active depends on the kind of home being sold, and the valuers expect campaigns to run longer wherever the answer is fewer than before.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
