From one year to the next, the capital growth rate produced by the property market of an individual city is a very jagged line. There is no orderly sequence of timing.
Performance is not about taking it in turns, upswings, peaks, downturns, recoveries and timeframes.
It’s about ‘inputs.’
The term property clock might sound sophisticated, but decades of official evidence confirms that property markets do not function anything like a clock.
Property market cycles definitely are real.
Let me be clear though: there is absolutely nothing circular or orderly about how property markets perform.
I suppose the reference to property clocks originated from an attempt to adopt a visual illustration which describes where an individual city’s property market sits within a cycle.
The ‘clock’ analogy implies that each cycle runs the same length of time. There are 60-minutes in every hour, 24-hours in every day, etc.
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As you’ll soon see, there is no defined period for property market growth cycles, nor the amount of time between property booms.
Clocks have a constant order, or sequence. 8 o’clock occurs after 7 o’clock, darkness is followed by the sun rising, the little hand swings down from 3 to 5 o’clock, the clock reaches its peak at 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock is at the bottom.
Conversely, there is nothing sequential about an individual city’s property market.
As an example, a 5-year period could produce respective annual changes in median house value of 3 percent, followed by 9 percent, a 3 percent decline, then 4 and 14 percent growth. What sort of clock is that?
Whether it be a capital city or regional location, no location is immune to experiencing prolonged periods of very little growth.
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Decades of evidence of the performance of each of Australia’s 400+ townships confirms:
- the timeframe between each city’s growth cycles can be just a few years or as long as 15 years,
- a boom can be one (1) great year, an enormously strong decade, or a 3 to 4-year period,
- the conclusion of a boom period can be followed by a single year of small price decline, a longish flat period, a period of significant decline, or continued growth at more ‘normalised’ rates [refer these examples].
The ‘property clock’ does not work!
Progress and performance are neither linear nor circular.
There is no mathematical equation.
And regardless of what the tech-heads might like to believe, it will always be impossible to develop an algorithm which accurately predicts property market performance several years into the future. Always!
‘AI’ is utterly useless for that, and many other important decisions!
But a century of evidence is a huge body of work to prove that, when held long enough, buying real estate in absolutely any of Australia’s 400+ townships will produce very handsome rewards.
Just make sure one does not rely on the property clock to predict when it will happen.
Consider this…
If we wind ‘the clock’ back to 2010, real estate in Darwin was among the highest in Australia.
Those real estate values were the same several years later, and plenty of naïve investors were saying “…other markets have grown… Darwin has not… therefore it is due.”
Fast forward to 2025, a typical apartment in Australia’s northern-most capital city is worth less than 15 years ago and house values are only 10 percent higher [refer Darwin property market history].
Driven entirely by activity from a critical mass of yield-chasing property investors, Darwin’s property market started to boom in early-2025.
That said, the key message in this post is not directly about Darwin.
The aim is to remind people that PERFORMANCE is an outcome which is determined by the quality of all inputs ~ Simon Pressley, Propertyology
Anywhere at any time…
Australian history is littered with great examples of a city’s property market experiencing a prolonged flat period.
From 1990 through to now, Sydney has experienced three (3) separate very lean blocks of 5-years each [refer Sydney’s property market history].
Perth’s median house value in 2020 was the same as 14-years earlier. That clock was like a ticking time bomb.
Hobart produced no growth over the 6 years ending 2014.
In the beautiful Whitsundays region, the median house price of $370,000 in 2019 was the same in 2007 (12-years of no growth).
The clock was jammed in Brisbane for 10-long years. Apartments declined by 10 percent, and houses only increased by 10 percent across the decade ending 2020.
In Melbourne, the property clock was marking time for the entire first 7 years of the 1990’s – zero growth!
People would be wise to use this as a sage reminder that, regardless of whether a city is big or small, it is impossible for a city’s property market to become a top performer until stakeholders make a lot of good decisions that eventually produce economic growth of the top echelon.
Over the last 8 years ending 2025, the $200 billion state debt headlines abysmal economic management which once again dragged Melbourne’s property market performance into the doldrums.
Even the significant population growth was unable to move the clock hand.
While Melbourne produced only 10 percent capital growth for the last 8 years dozens of townships across Australia increased by between 60 percent and 100 percent. That’s a thrashing!
Focus on the inputs, not the utterings…
There is no defined timeframe that determines when a city’s property market is about to take off.
Anyone who says otherwise is unable to tell the time.
Remember, there are 400+ townships in this hugely diverse country.
One who thinks the location with the very best potential to sink their hard-earned capital is to simply select the one which has flat-lined for a long time only has themselves to blame if ‘that clock’ barely ticks for the next several years.
One can’t turn the clock back.
The most informed decisions are made through joining the dots of a wide range of economic decisions in recent years and skilfully anticipating how those inputs will influence confidence and revenue streams in future years.
Ignore the clock!
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