# Why Queensland house and unit prices move at different speeds
Land, supply pipelines, buyer mix and index design explain why Queensland houses and units rarely move together, and what the gap between them can and cannot tell you.
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Every month a single headline number tells Queensland how its home values moved. Under that number sit two markets that behave differently: detached houses on their own land, and units, townhouses and apartments that share a site and a building with neighbours. In some months they move together. In others one races ahead while the other stalls, and the difference between them can run for years.
That difference matters to almost everyone in a sale. A seller of a house reads a city-wide figure that may be pulled up or down by units. A first home buyer weighing a two-bedroom unit against a small house in an outer suburb is, in effect, betting on which of the two will hold its value. An investor comparing yields is comparing assets that respond to different forces. This guide explains why the two segments move at different speeds: the share of land in each, the way new supply arrives, who buys what, and how the main price series separate houses from units. It then shows how to read the gap between them, using dated figures from Cotality, PropTrack, the ABS and the REIQ as illustrations rather than predictions.
5.3%Brisbane house values, year to September 2026
8.5%Brisbane unit values, same twelve months
$311,451gap between the two median values
Cotality Home Value Index, results to 30 September 2026, Brisbane. The gap is the house median value of $1,146,078 less the unit median value of $834,627.
## Two markets under one headline
A combined "dwellings" figure blends houses and units into one series. In Brisbane, Cotality's index for the year to September 2026 put dwellings at 5.9 per cent, between houses at 5.3 per cent and units at 8.5 per cent. The combined figure sat much closer to houses, consistent with houses making up most of the housing stock. At the 2021 Census, separate houses were 74.8 per cent of Queensland's occupied private dwellings, flats and apartments 12.5 per cent, and semi-detached, row and terrace homes and townhouses 11.7 per cent, according to the ABS.
The same month showed how the two can diverge even inside a downturn. Over the three months to September 2026, Cotality recorded Brisbane house values down 4.9 per cent and unit values down 4.2 per cent. In the month of September alone the falls were almost level, 1.5 per cent for houses and 1.4 per cent for units. Over twelve months, units still led by a clear margin. One segment can be weaker in the short run and stronger over the year, which is why a single headline is a poor guide to either.
PropTrack's figures for September 2026, as reported by the trade outlet Real Estate Business, pointed the same way with different numbers: Brisbane houses down 0.3 per cent for the month and up 3.0 per cent over the year, units down 0.2 per cent for the month and up 7.1 per cent over the year. The size of each move differs between the two providers; the order does not. Over the year, units were ahead in both.
## Land appreciates, buildings wear out
The first reason the two segments diverge is what a buyer is actually paying for. A house price bundles two things: a building and the land under it. The building is a manufactured object that ages, needs repairs and can be replaced at a cost. The land is fixed in supply at that location, and its value carries most of what a suburb's position, schools, transport and zoning are worth.
The Reserve Bank put numbers on this split for Brisbane in a 2018 research paper by Ross Kendall and Peter Tulip, using 2016 data. They estimated the average Brisbane house price at $542,000 and broke it into three parts.
What an average Brisbane house price was made of in 2016Dollars, average house
Reserve Bank of Australia, Research Discussion Paper 2018-03, The Effect of Zoning on Housing Prices, Table 3, Brisbane, 2016.
Land in total was $275,000, or 51 per cent of the price, and the structure 49 per cent. The paper split the land further: $116,000 for the physical land, valued as extra space at that location, and $159,000 that the authors attributed to zoning, the premium created by limits on how many homes may be built. Those shares are a decade old and Brisbane's land values have risen sharply since, so they illustrate the structure of a house price, not today's proportions.
The point for price movements is this. When demand for a location rises, the extra value lands mostly on the scarce part, which is the land. A house owner holds a full parcel. A unit owner holds a much smaller share of a site, spread across every lot in the building, and a larger part of what they paid is for the structure itself. The Reserve Bank's 2017 bulletin on houses and apartments said apartments are cheaper partly because they are smaller and partly because they use land more intensively, and that land costs weigh more heavily on detached houses because land for them is more limited than for higher-density homes.
## How a unit owner holds land
In Queensland, most units sit in a community titles scheme. The owner holds their lot outright and shares the common property with the other owners through the body corporate. The Queensland Government's body corporate guidance explains that each scheme has two lot entitlement schedules. The interest schedule sets each owner's share of the common property and body corporate assets if the scheme ends, and the value of the lot for calculating local government rates and charges.
That arrangement shapes how land value reaches a unit's price. One site carries many titles, and each lot's interest in it is a fraction set by the schedule. A rise in the value of the site is real for unit owners, but it is shared across all of them, so each owner's slice is small relative to the price they paid.
The size of recent land value rises shows why the land share matters. The Queensland Government's record of past valuations lists the overall change in land values for each council area valued in a given year. Brisbane's land values rose 17.4 per cent in the 2025 valuation. In the 2026 valuation, issued on 11 March 2026 with a valuation date of 1 October 2025, the Gold Coast rose 23.4 per cent, the Sunshine Coast 24.2 per cent and Ipswich 50.7 per cent. These are changes across all land in each area, not residential land alone, but they give a sense of the force acting most directly on houses.
## Supply arrives at different speeds
The second reason is how new homes come to market. A detached house is usually built one at a time. An apartment building adds many homes at once, years after the decision to build.
The Reserve Bank's 2017 bulletin set out the difference in timing. Most detached houses take six to nine months to build. Large high-rise projects take two to three years, and very large towers four to five. That means apartment supply responds to conditions that existed years earlier. A wave of approvals in a strong market can deliver completions into a weaker one, adding a large number of near-identical units to one area in a short time. Detached supply, by contrast, tends to adjust in smaller steps.
The two pipelines are also counted and reported separately. In the ABS building approvals figures for August 2026, seasonally adjusted, Queensland approved 3,327 dwellings in total, down 22.5 per cent on July, while private sector house approvals rose 6.5 per cent to 2,456. Nationally, private sector dwellings other than houses fell 21.2 per cent in the month. Cotality's September 2026 chart pack noted that house approvals have shown less volatility than units, which is one reason to look at unit approvals over several months before reading anything into them.
Construction costs press on both segments but feed through differently. The ABS producer price indexes for the June quarter 2026 showed the output price of house construction in Queensland up 3.1 per cent in the quarter and 8.0 per cent over the year, with fuel-related material and transport costs and labour shortages among the causes. For an established house, a higher replacement cost can support the value of the building. For new apartments, higher costs change what gets built. An REA Group economist, quoted by Mortgage Professional Australia in July 2026, said 73 per cent of Queensland apartment developments were priced at $1.5 million or more, against 55 per cent nationally, as high construction costs pushed developers towards premium projects.
## Who buys what
The third reason is the buyer. Houses and units attract different mixes of first home buyers, families, investors and downsizers, and each group responds to different pressures.
**Price point and borrowing.** Units are cheaper on average, so the loans behind them are smaller. The same REA Group economist said houses are more sensitive to rate rises because the mortgages attached to them are larger, and that house prices out of reach for many buyers were pushing them towards units, adding demand at the cheaper end.
**First home buyers.** A Ray White principal in West End, quoted in the same Mortgage Professional Australia report, described first home buyers priced out of houses turning to inner-city units in Brisbane. ABS lending figures for the June quarter 2026 showed 29,319 new loans to first home buyers nationally, down 2.9 per cent on the March quarter, while their value rose 0.2 per cent to $18.4 billion.
**Investors.** The Reserve Bank's 2017 bulletin noted that domestic investors and foreign buyers have generally been much more prominent in buying new apartments than other dwellings. A change in investor appetite therefore reaches units faster. In the June quarter 2026 the ABS recorded 52,599 new investor loans nationally, down 8.6 per cent, with their value down 10.2 per cent to $37.1 billion. The REIQ, releasing its March quarter data on 28 May 2026, reported that investor confidence had taken a dent after federal budget proposals on negative gearing and capital gains tax.
**Downsizers.** On the Sunshine Coast, a local agent quoted by Mortgage Professional Australia described downsizers using equity from their homes as the main buyers of units there. Buyers funding a purchase from the sale of a larger home rely less on new borrowing than first home buyers do.
No single source gives Queensland's buyer mix by dwelling type, so these accounts describe tendencies, not shares. What they show is that each segment has its own set of buyers, and a change in rates, lending rules or tax settings does not fall evenly on both.
## How the indexes draw the line
A gap between houses and units is only as reliable as the line each source draws between them. The main series do not all draw it in the same place, and they do not all measure the same thing.
How each source separates houses from units
Source
What is measured
Where the line falls
Cotality Home Value Index
Hedonic index of estimated values, with median values
Separate house and unit tables; the dwelling type split is not defined in the release
PropTrack Home Price Index
Hedonic index, calculated separately for houses and units
Torrens title counts as a house; strata and other titles as a unit
ABS Total Value of Dwellings
Median prices and transfer counts, no weighting
Established houses against attached dwellings that share a structural part
REIQ quarterly medians
Median sale prices by area, on Cotality data
Houses against units
Cotality Home Value Index release, October 2026; PropTrack Home Price Index FAQs, 2025; ABS Total Value of Dwellings methodology, June quarter 2026; REIQ media release, 28 May 2026.
The distinction matters most for townhouses and duplexes. Under PropTrack's title-based rule, a townhouse on a strata title counts as a unit. Under the ABS definition, attached dwellings are those that share a structural component with another dwelling, a test based on the building rather than the title, which takes in flats, units and apartments. A suburb with many new townhouses can therefore move one series' "unit" figure more than another's.
The method matters too. Cotality and PropTrack both use hedonic models, which adjust for the features of the homes that sold, such as bedrooms, bathrooms and land size. A median, as used by the REIQ and the ABS, is simply the middle sale price of whatever sold that quarter. If more large, new apartments sell in one quarter, the unit median can rise without any existing unit becoming worth more.
The 2026 figures show how the picture shifts with the series, the area and the period. On the REIQ's medians for Queensland, units rose 4.81 per cent in the March quarter against 4.21 per cent for houses. In the June quarter, Australian Broker reported, the REIQ recorded the house median down 0.91 per cent to $983,000 and the unit median down 1.22 per cent to $810,000, so units fell further. Cotality's hedonic index for Brisbane, over the three months to September, showed the opposite order, with houses down more than units. Different areas, periods and methods mean these figures cannot be compared directly. Neither series is wrong; they answer different questions. A median says what the typical sale cost. A hedonic index tries to say how much a comparable home changed in value.
## Reading the gap in dollars and as a ratio
The gap between houses and units can be read two ways, and they can point in different directions.
The dollar gap is the house value less the unit value. The ratio is the house value divided by the unit value. If both segments rise by the same percentage, the ratio stays put but the dollar gap widens, simply because houses start from a higher base. A widening dollar gap is therefore not, on its own, a sign that houses are pulling away. The ratio is the cleaner way to compare relative movement.
Brisbane houses against units over six monthsCotality median values
Results to
Houses
Units
Gap and ratio
31 March 2026
$1,207,718
$865,548
$342,170, houses 1.40 times units
31 August 2026
$1,180,552
$854,721
$325,831, houses 1.38 times units
30 September 2026
$1,146,078
$834,627
$311,451, houses 1.37 times units
Cotality Home Value Index results to 31 March, 31 August and 30 September 2026, Brisbane. Gaps and ratios are calculated from the published median values.
Over those six months both the dollar gap and the ratio narrowed. Between the August and September results, the Brisbane house median value fell $34,474 and the unit median value fell $20,094. In percentage terms the monthly falls were close, but house values started from a higher base and had already eased more over the quarter.
Two cautions apply. A median value is the middle of the estimated values in a region, not the price of any particular home, so a gap between medians compares two typical homes of very different kinds. And a house in one suburb and a unit in another are not substitutes for each other. The city-wide gap is a summary of two distributions, not a price list.
## What a narrowing or widening gap can mean
A change in the gap is a symptom. On its own it does not say which of the forces above is at work, but each force leaves a pattern that can be checked against other data.
**When the ratio narrows** because units rise faster, as in Brisbane in the year to March 2026, the usual explanations are affordability and buyer mix. When houses become too expensive for many buyers, demand shifts to the cheaper segment. Cotality's March 2026 results showed Brisbane units up 21.5 per cent over twelve months against 18.5 per cent for houses, and by July 2026 a Brisbane agent was describing first home buyers moving into inner-city units.
**When the ratio narrows** because houses fall faster, the price tier is a likely factor. Cotality's release of results to 31 August 2026 noted that in most capitals the upper end of the market was weaker than the lower end, though that gap was closing as the downturn spread. In Brisbane the house median value sits well above the unit median value, so a downturn led by higher-value homes can show up as houses easing more than units.
**When the ratio widens**, the usual reasons run the other way: land values rising strongly, a surge of new apartment completions in one area, or a pullback by investors who favour units. Each of these can be checked. Land valuations are published by council area, approvals by month, and lending by buyer type.
A gap that moves over one or two months is often noise from sampling and revisions. PropTrack's FAQs note that its full history is recalculated each month and that the latest three years of index values are revised. A shift that persists across several quarters, and appears in more than one source, is a better basis for drawing a conclusion.
## Regional Queensland tells a different story
Outside the capital, the gap behaves differently, and the figures show it.
In Cotality's results to 30 September 2026, the regional Queensland house median value was $841,639 and the unit median value $816,214, a gap of $25,425, with houses 1.03 times units. In Brisbane the same month, houses were 1.37 times units. Over twelve months, regional houses rose 6.6 per cent and regional units 5.5 per cent: the reverse of Brisbane, where units led.
A regional unit median that sits so close to the house median says more about where regional units are than about their size. Regional Queensland is not one market: a coastal apartment and a house in a Western Downs town can both count in the same regional figure, and the 2026 land valuations alone ranged from a 12.6 per cent rise in the Western Downs to 24.2 per cent on the Sunshine Coast. A regional figure blends places like these, which is why the regional gap is best read alongside local figures for the area in question.
## Checks before drawing a conclusion
A few questions help separate a real shift in the gap from an artefact of the numbers.
1. Is the figure a hedonic index or a median? A median can move because the mix of sales changed.
2. Which homes does "unit" include? Title-based and structure-based definitions treat townhouses differently.
3. Is the gap read in dollars or as a ratio? Equal percentage changes widen a dollar gap without changing the ratio.
4. Does the shift appear in more than one source, and over more than one quarter?
5. Is the area a single city, the regional remainder, or the whole state? Each blends very different markets.
6. What else moved at the same time: land valuations, approvals, construction costs, investor or first home buyer lending?
Keep in mind
A gap between medians is not a price for your home
City-wide house and unit figures summarise thousands of different properties. A particular house or unit can move against its segment because of its suburb, its building, its land size or its condition.
None of these checks predicts where either segment will go next. What they do is explain why the two rarely move in step. A house owner holds land that carries most of a location's gains and losses. A unit owner holds a shared slice of land and a larger share of building, in a market where supply arrives in large blocks and the buyer mix leans towards first home buyers, investors and downsizers. Read that way, a change in the gap between houses and units is a signal about which of those forces is strongest at the time, not a verdict on which kind of home is the better one to own.