New or established? Eastern Suburbs apartment value in 2026

Market commentary · Eastern Suburbs apartments

New, or nearly new? What you’re really paying for in the east

Every few weeks a seller asks me some version of the same question. There is a new building going up two streets away, the display suite is beautiful, and the off-the-plan prices are eye-watering. So what, they want to know, does that make my ten-year-old apartment worth? The unspoken half of the question is the more interesting one: if I were buying, would I pay the new price, or would I be smarter to buy what already exists?

I have spent thirty-five years selling apartments across the Eastern Suburbs, and my answer has become steadily less fashionable. In Rose Bay and Bondi Junction in particular — where new stock is arriving faster than anywhere else in my patch — I think the value, and the opportunity, sits firmly in quality established units. The newest unit on the street is very often the worst buy on it. And for once I can prove it with the numbers rather than assert it.

What actually separates a 2017 building from a 2026 one

Start with what does not change. A three-bedroom apartment built in 2015 and one built in 2026 are put together in much the same way — concrete, steel, glass, the same trades, broadly the same envelope. The footprint is comparable. The room sizes are comparable. A bedroom is a bedroom; a living room is a living room. Nobody has invented a larger square metre in the last decade.

So the premium on new is not structural. It is finishes and it is amenity — the stone in the kitchen, the tapware, the joinery, the lobby, the concierge, the pool on the roof. And here is the part the display suite would rather you did not dwell on: the good buildings of a decade ago already had all of that. The prestige stock of 2012 to 2017 was designed by named interior architects, with lobbies and common areas every bit as considered as the ones being marketed today. The designer foyer is not a new invention. Where new genuinely differs is at the margins a buyer can close themselves — a kitchen updated, a bathroom updated, at a cost that is known, finite, and a fraction of the gap between established and new.

A bedroom is a bedroom. Nobody has invented a larger square metre in the last decade.

What a dozen recent sales actually show

I pulled the entry price and the most recent resale on a spread of three- and two-bedroom apartments across both suburbs, and reduced each to the only figure that lets you compare like with like: the rate per square metre of internal area, then and now.

Read the two columns that matter — the rate you paid to get in, and the growth you got out. The relationship is almost linear, and it runs the opposite way to the marketing. The apartments bought at 11,000 to 17,000 dollars a square metre grew 57 to 94 per cent. The apartments bought at 27,000 to 38,000 a square metre — the newer, premium, off-the-plan stock — grew 11 to 21 per cent. The single weakest performer on the list is the one bought at the very top of the range: a three-bedroom purchased off the plan in 2017 at more than 38,000 dollars a square metre, up just 15 per cent in nine years.

The one apparent exception — a Rose Bay three-bedroom up 58 per cent from a 2020 purchase — sold with a 239-square-metre garden attached, which is what buyers actually paid the premium for. Strip the outdoor area out and the internal rate is flattered. Outdoor space and scarcity drove that result. “New” did not.

The owners who did best paid the least per square metre to get in. The ones who did worst paid the most.

The gap isn’t value — it’s the cost of building in 2026

So where does new stock sit on that same scale? On my read of current campaigns, developers are selling new apartments in these suburbs at roughly 45,000 to 55,000 dollars a square metre of internal area. That is not a valuation. It is a cost-plus number: land, construction, and the margin, GST, marketing and holding costs stacked on top. The buyer of new is funding all of it.

And the cost of building has run away. According to Cotality’s Cordell Construction Cost Index, building in Australia now costs roughly 47 per cent more than it did before the pandemic. Apartments are the sharp end: on ABS Building Activity data they cost more than twice as much per square metre to build as houses, because lifts, fire services, basement parking and common areas concentrate cost into less sellable floor. Altus Group’s Q1 2026 outlook points to further increases in steel and concrete — import tariffs, cement surcharges — even as higher-density approvals have fallen 26 per cent because fewer projects stack up.

Now put that beside the table. New stock is being sold today at 45,000 to 55,000 dollars a square metre — a level it took the best-performing established apartments on my list fifteen to nineteen years of solid growth to reach. The buyer of new is not getting in early. They are getting in at the ceiling. There is very little scale left above them, and the recent premium sales prove it: the stock that already sold at 38,000 a square metre has barely moved since.

Rent doesn’t know how old the building is

Here is the test that settles it for me. Put a seven-year-old apartment and a brand-new one of the same size next to each other and ask the rental market to choose. It won’t. A good tenant will pay much the same for either — in the order of 1,200 to 1,400 dollars a week for a quality two-bedroom in these suburbs. The market rewards the location, the light and the floor plan, not the year on the compliance certificate.

Follow that through. A well-built established two-bedroom might cost around 1.8 million dollars. The equivalent new one is asked at three and a half to four million. The rent is the same. You are paying roughly double the capital for identical income. Negative gearing does not rescue that; it merely offsets a loss you did not need to take.

What the national data confirms

None of this is peculiar to my dozen sales. Cotality’s Pain & Gain report — the national record of who resells at a profit and who doesn’t — is blunt on the point: units underperform houses, consistently and by a wide margin, and the sellers taking losses are overwhelmingly recent buyers with short holding periods. For years the single largest category of loss-making resale in this country has been the second sale of a new apartment. You pay the new premium once, on the way in, and the resale market declines to pay it back on the way out.

That is the flaw in “new.” The one quality it is sold on is the one quality it cannot keep. A new building is new for a day. Settle it, and a year later it is a year old; the year after that, two. It ages into exactly the established stock it was priced above — while carrying a premium the resale market never agreed to.

Why I think new stock carries the sharpest downside from here

This is my own assessment rather than anything I can put a citation against, so take it as such. The market has already turned — Cotality’s Home Value Index had Sydney down 1.2 per cent in June 2026, with the broader adjustment still working through. In a correction, the first thing to go is the softest part of the price, and in a new apartment the premium is the softest part there is. It is air. Established stock has less to give back because it never carried the premium in the first place. Add delayed completions, developers settling into a weaker market than the one they sold into, and bank valuations at settlement coming in under contract, and my honest expectation is that the heaviest falls in this cycle land on new apartments — not on the well-built established stock that has already found its level.

Where the opportunity actually sits

For a buyer, and particularly for a downsizer selling a family home, the smart move is the quality established unit — the modern ten-to-fifteen-year-old apartment with good bones, designer common areas and a sensible entry rate. A well-held three-bedroom in Bondi Junction is still transacting around 2.6 to 3.4 million dollars; the equivalent floor space in a new building, at 45,000 to 55,000 a square metre, asks a great deal more for a slower ride. That is not a close call.

One caution, kept general because the specifics belong in a private conversation rather than an article. Even at the very top of this market, some prestige stock bought off the plan in recent years is barely re-achieving its purchase price once you allow for the years that have passed — the fifteen-per-cent-over-nine-years result above is not an outlier, it is a warning. Larger, higher-priced apartments in particular are sitting unsold for long stretches. That is the pattern to watch as you plan your next move. It is not a reason to freeze. It is a reason to buy the building, the floor plan, the aspect and the location — and to be very careful about paying extra for a date.

If you’re the one selling

If you own a good established unit and need to transact, my view is that you are in a stronger position than you might think. You are not carrying a new-build premium into a falling market. You are selling something the rental market values on equal terms with anything newer, at a rate per square metre that already reflects reality. In a market like this one, that is a sound thing to be selling.

The observations above reflect my own assessment of current market conditions and are not financial or investment advice. Per-square-metre figures are calculated on internal floor area from disclosed sale prices and should be treated as indicative; individual circumstances vary and independent advice should be sought before any decision. Sources cited where noted: Cotality (Cordell Construction Cost Index; Pain & Gain; Home Value Index), ABS Building Activity, Altus Group.