Reading a suburb median price in Queensland: what it shows and hides

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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The median price is the first number most people look up about a suburb. It appears on appraisals, in bank valuations, in council area tables and in almost every conversation between an agent and a seller. It looks like a fact about the suburb. It is really a fact about the particular homes that sold there in a particular period.

That difference explains most of the surprises medians produce: the suburb that appears to jump in a quarter in which nothing much happened, the two websites that disagree by tens of thousands of dollars, the median that fell while every owner in the street was sure values were rising.

This guide goes through what a median is, the four things that move it besides price (the sample, the mix, the period and the boundary), and a simple order in which to read any Queensland median. The examples come from the Real Estate Institute of Queensland's figures for the March quarter 2026, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Queensland Government.

REIQ notes and medians for the March quarter 2026, published 28 May 2026. Gaps computed from the REIQ's published medians.

What a median is, exactly

The REIQ gives the definition in the notes to its quarterly releases. A median sale price is found by arranging a set of sale prices from lowest to highest and selecting the middle value, the 50th percentile: half the recorded sales were below it and half above.

A median is not an average. Take eleven house sales in an imaginary suburb, in thousands of dollars: 690, 720, 745, 760, 780, 795, 810, 830, 850, 880 and 1,150. The median is the sixth, $795,000. The average of the same eleven is about $819,000, pulled up by the one sale at $1.15 million. These are illustrative figures, not market data.

That resistance to extreme sales is why medians are preferred for housing. The ABS draws the same line in its Total Value of Dwellings methodology: its headline figure is a mean, the average value of all dwellings, while its median is the price at the mid-point of the properties sold, and it asks users to exercise caution when comparing the two. For Queensland, the ABS mean dwelling price for the March quarter 2026 was $1,123,700, a figure that covers every dwelling in the state and should not be set beside a suburb median.

The sample: how many sales stand behind it

A median is only as steady as the number of sales it is drawn from. The REIQ states its threshold plainly: only suburbs and regions that recorded at least 10 sales for the quarter at the time of reporting are considered statistically significant. Below that, no median is treated as meaningful.

Ten is a minimum, not a comfortable number. With ten or eleven sales, replacing a single sale near the middle changes the median, and swapping two or three changes it a lot.

The scale of the difference between areas is worth keeping in mind. In the March quarter 2026, the REIQ recorded 2,792 house sales in the Brisbane council area, 1,835 on the Gold Coast, 1,544 in Moreton Bay, 1,317 on the Sunshine Coast and 1,185 in Logan. Medians built on more than a thousand sales move slowly and mean what they say. A single suburb inside one of those council areas may contribute a few dozen sales to the total, or fewer.

The same release shows what smaller samples look like. Cairns, the fifth largest unit market in the state by volume, recorded 306 unit sales in the quarter, and its quarterly unit median fell 7.45 per cent to $435,000. In Rockhampton, the unit median rose 9.03 per cent in the quarter to $525,000 and 33.55 per cent over the year. Neither figure is wrong. Both are more likely to reflect which units sold than a change of that size in the value of every unit in the city.

The mix: when the homes change, not the values

The second thing that moves a median is the mix of homes sold. The Reserve Bank of Australia described the mechanism in a Bulletin article in June 2006: only about 1.5 per cent of the housing stock sells in a quarter, and the homes in that small sample are not the same kind from one quarter to the next.

Return to the imaginary suburb. Suppose no home changes in value, but next quarter a different eleven sell: fewer of the older cottages, more of the renovated family homes, and one house on the river.

The median has risen $55,000, or 6.9 per cent, and not one home is worth more than it was. A headline would report strong growth; an owner of one of the cottages would be misled.

The Reserve Bank measured how much of this goes on in real data. In Sydney and Melbourne, it found that around 60 per cent of the quarterly variation in median price changes came from shifts in the mix of sales between more and less expensive suburbs. It also found that advanced measures which adjust for the mix contained around 70 per cent less noise than the raw median.

Mix effects are strongest in suburbs with very different kinds of homes side by side: old houses on large blocks next to new townhouses, or a riverfront strip beside ordinary streets. A new estate or apartment building selling out in one quarter can move a suburb median on its own.

Measures built to take the mix out

Because the mix distorts a plain median, statisticians have built measures that hold it still. The Reserve Bank's 2006 article describes three, and the names turn up in the notes of most Australian price reports.

The first is the stratified, or mix-adjusted, median. Sales are sorted into groups of similar suburbs, a median is taken inside each group, and the groups are then combined with fixed weights, so that a quarter in which many expensive suburbs happened to sell does not lift the result. In the version the Reserve Bank tested, the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne were allocated to ten groups according to their long-run median price. This is the measure behind the 70 per cent figure above; set against a median that had only been seasonally adjusted, the Reserve Bank found it still carried around 50 per cent less noise.

The second is the hedonic method, which the Reserve Bank describes as explaining the price of each sale by the attributes of the property, such as its location, type and size, and the period in which it sold. It depends on detailed records of what each home is like, which housing databases often lack. The third is the repeat-sales method, which uses only homes that have sold more than once and measures the change between their sales. Its estimates, the article notes, keep being revised as later sales arrive.

The Reserve Bank found that the three advanced measures moved closely together, with correlations of around 0.9 between their quarterly changes.

The ABS uses the first approach for its Total Value of Dwellings, stratifying by location, at the level of its Statistical Area Level 2, and by dwelling type. Its published medians are a different matter: the ABS methodology states that no stratification or weighting is applied to them. That is one more reason why a plain median and an index can report different movements for the same city in the same quarter, as the Brisbane unit figures further down show.

None of these methods reaches down to a single suburb in a single quarter. They need many sales to work with, which is why adjusted measures are published for cities and large regions, and why the suburb figure most people look up is still a plain median.

The time of year

The calendar is a quieter influence, and the Reserve Bank measured it too. In the data it examined, seasonal effects alone explained around one-half of the quarterly variation in median house prices in Melbourne and around one-third in Sydney. The article does not give an equivalent figure for Brisbane, so the size of the effect in Queensland cannot be read from it.

The principle carries over all the same. A quarterly median compared with the quarter before it mixes two things: the change in prices and the change of season. The same quarter a year earlier is the cleaner comparison, since both figures then come from the same season.

Quarterly and annual medians

Most Queensland tables give two medians for the same place. The quarterly median covers sales in the latest three months. The annual median covers sales over the latest twelve.

For houses, the two statewide figures are $72,500 apart; for units, $67,500. In Greater Brisbane the REIQ's quarterly house median was $1.15 million and its annual median $1.039 million, a difference of $111,000.

Neither is the "real" one. In a rising market the quarterly median is higher because it contains only recent sales, while the annual median still includes sales made nine or twelve months earlier at lower prices. In a falling market the order reverses.

They are useful for different things. The quarterly median is more current and, for large areas, a fair guide to present prices. The annual median stands on roughly four times as many sales, so it is far steadier, and for a single suburb it is usually the only one worth quoting. The trade-off is that it is always looking backwards. Quoting a quarterly median for a small suburb, or comparing one source's quarterly figure with another's annual figure, is the most common way to end up with a misleading comparison.

Houses and units are separate markets

A median for "all dwellings" blends two different products. In the March quarter 2026, the REIQ's statewide quarterly medians were $990,000 for houses and $817,500 for units, a difference of $172,500. A suburb's combined median therefore depends heavily on how many of each sold.

This matters most in suburbs where the stock is changing. Where new apartment buildings are settling, units make up a growing share of sales and can pull a combined median down while house values rise. For that reason the REIQ, the ABS and Domain all report the two separately; the ABS uses the terms established houses and attached dwellings.

Even the unit category is broad. A median for units can pool high-rise apartments, older walk-up blocks and townhouses, depending on how the source classifies them, and the notes that accompany the figures do not always spell this out. In a suburb with all three, the median says little about any one of them.

Domain's report for the June quarter 2026, published on 23 July, gave a live example of two sources parting ways on units. It showed the Brisbane unit median falling 1.2 per cent over the quarter, while Cotality's index, which estimates values across all units instead of taking the median of those sold, had Brisbane unit values rising 2.2 per cent over the same three months.

Which boundary is being measured

The same name can refer to very different areas. In the REIQ's March quarter figures, the median house price in the Brisbane council area was $1.46 million. For Greater Brisbane, which adds the surrounding council areas such as Ipswich, Logan and Moreton Bay, it was $1.15 million. The $310,000 between them is a difference of geography, not of opinion. Ipswich's quarterly house median in the same release was $901,825.

A worked example shows how a boundary blends markets. Imagine a council area made of two districts, one where 300 houses sold at a median of $1.4 million and one where 700 sold at a median of $850,000. The median of the 1,000 sales together falls somewhere between the two, closer to the district with more sales, and may match neither district's typical home. If, in the next quarter, the first district supplies 400 of the 1,000 sales, the combined median rises although neither district's own median has changed. These are illustrative figures, not market data, and the mechanism is the mix effect again, working through geography.

Suburb boundaries bring their own quirks. Large suburbs can contain several distinct markets. Some sources report by suburb, others by postcode, which may cover several suburbs, and others by the statistical areas the ABS defines. Domain notes that its capital city figures are stratified medians while other geographies use a plain middle sale price, so even within one report the method changes with the boundary.

Before comparing two medians, it is worth checking that they describe the same patch of ground.

Late sales and revised figures

A median is published before all the sales of the period are known. The Reserve Bank's 2006 article put the usual lag between agreeing a price and settling at one to three months in Australia, and noted that if dearer properties take longer to settle, early estimates are biased downwards and later revised up.

The publishers allow for this in their own ways. The REIQ's threshold of ten sales applies "at the time of reporting", an acknowledgement that the count is still growing. The ABS says its median prices and transfer counts are revised across the most recent ten quarters as more records arrive, and warns that revisions can be substantial, especially in the quarter immediately following first release. It publishes about twelve weeks after the end of each quarter, working from sales records of the state and territory land titles and Valuer-General offices.

The Reserve Bank's article gives a sense of how incomplete a first count can be. For the measures it tested, the initial samples were typically less than 50 per cent of the final ones. Its stratified measure held up well on those partial samples, with first estimates close to the final ones. A plain median for a small area has no such protection: when half the sales are still to come, the middle sale can move.

The practical consequence is that the first median for a quarter, especially in a small suburb, may be recalculated later on a larger sample and come out differently.

What a median cannot say about one home

A suburb median is not a valuation of any property in the suburb. The home at the median is a real home with its own block, condition and street; a given house may be worth half or double that figure and the median would still be accurate.

Two other official numbers are often mistaken for a price guide.

The Valuer-General's figures are produced by a mass appraisal approach, the Queensland Government explains, which assesses many properties at a common date and relies mainly on sales of vacant or lightly improved land. A statutory land value below the suburb median says nothing about what the house on it would fetch.

The sale records themselves are public information held by the state. The Queensland Government says property data collected under the Land Valuation Act 2010 can be purchased, including the sales history of an individual property, and that brokers distribute its valuation and sales data, known as QVAS. Those records are the raw material from which commercial data firms, and through them the REIQ, build their medians. The REIQ's notes say its figures are derived from Cotality data.

An order for reading any median

A median that passes those five checks is a sound description of what buyers paid in that place and period. It is where an appraisal starts, before the comparable sales, the condition of the home and the state of the market on the day are weighed.

A suburb median reports the middle of what sold. It becomes useful once the reader knows how many homes that was, of what kind, and over how long.

For most Queensland suburbs, the steadiest picture comes from the annual median for the right dwelling type, read alongside the number of sales, with the quarterly figure used as a hint about direction and nothing more. For council areas and for Greater Brisbane, where thousands of sales stand behind each number, the quarterly median can be taken much more at face value.

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.

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