Six Years, One Market: Eastern Suburbs Property Data 2020–2026

Market analysis · 2020–2026

Reading six years of Eastern Suburbs sales data

Reading the rate cycle, the volume, and the price data behind why today’s market feels different — drawn from close to eighteen thousand settled transactions across Woollahra and Waverley.

I’ve sold property in the Eastern Suburbs through five distinct interest rate cycles, but none has moved as fast, or reshaped buyer behaviour as thoroughly, as the six years just gone. To understand why the phone rings differently in 2026 than it did in 2021, you have to look at the whole arc, not just today’s snapshot. Woollahra and Waverley, the two council areas that sit at the heart of the Eastern Suburbs, recorded close to eighteen thousand house and unit sales between January 2020 and July 2026. Laid end to end, year by year, the data tells a story that rates wrote and buyers responded to.

What follows is that story in six charts, built from the settled sales record for nineteen suburbs from Bondi to Point Piper, cross-checked against RBA cash rate decisions, ABS inflation data and national employment figures for each year. I’ve stripped out anything that couldn’t be verified — batch-recorded development site sales, price entries that were clearly data errors, and resale pairs that almost certainly reflect a knockdown-rebuild rather than genuine market movement. What’s left is as clean a six-year picture of this market as I’ve been able to put together.

The mechanism: what moved, and why

Every swing in this market over the past six years traces back to the same lever. The Reserve Bank held the cash rate at an emergency low of 0.10 per cent through 2020 and 2021, and Eastern Suburbs buyers responded exactly as you’d expect — borrowing capacity expanded, and volume followed. Inflation was still subdued through that period, sitting under one per cent in 2020 and climbing to 3.5 per cent by the end of 2021, and unemployment was falling fast as the post-lockdown economy reopened.

Then came 2022: the fastest tightening cycle in the Reserve Bank’s modern history, taking the cash rate from 0.10 per cent to 3.10 per cent inside twelve months while inflation peaked at 7.8 per cent. Rates kept climbing through 2023 to a cycle high of 4.35 per cent, held broadly steady through 2024, and eased modestly to 3.60 per cent by the end of 2025. This year, the cash rate has moved back up to 4.35 per cent, and national unemployment has drifted up to around 4.4 per cent from a low of 3.5 per cent in 2022 — the first time since the tightening cycle began that both borrowing costs and job security are working against buyers at the same time.

Source: RBA cash rate target (year-end), ABS Consumer Price Index (annual, December quarter), ABS Labour Force Australia (national unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, December each year; 2026 figure to June).

Volume told the story before price did

Sales volume moved first and moved hardest. Combined house and unit sales across the nineteen suburbs jumped from 1,781 in 2020 to 3,051 in 2021 — a rise of more than seventy per cent, driven almost entirely by that 0.10 per cent floor. When the tightening cycle began in 2022, volume fell by close to a third in a single year, to 2,191 sales. It took until 2024 and 2025 for volume to recover to near-2021 levels, settling at 2,918 and 2,953 sales respectively as rates plateaued and buyers adjusted to the new cost of borrowing.

2026 is where the pattern breaks. The first seven months of this year have produced 1,253 sales — a pace that, annualised, sits well below every full year since 2022. Units have historically outsold houses roughly two to one across the Eastern Suburbs, and that ratio has held through every phase of the cycle, which tells me this isn’t a shift in what buyers want. It’s a shift in how many are transacting at all.

Source: property sales register, Woollahra and Waverley LGAs, houses and units only. 2026 figure covers January to July.

Two markets under one postcode band

“Eastern Suburbs” is a single phrase covering two genuinely different markets, and the volume and value data make that split obvious. Waverley LGA — Bondi, Bronte, Tamarama, Queens Park, Dover Heights and the surrounding beachside suburbs — has outsold Woollahra LGA on raw transaction count in every year since 2020, often by a considerable margin: 1,460 sales to 1,055 in 2021 alone. This is the more liquid, higher-turnover half of the Eastern Suburbs, skewing toward younger buyers, upgraders and a larger apartment stock.

Source: property sales register, grouped by local government area. Rose Bay and Vaucluse, which straddle both LGA exports in the underlying data, are excluded from this comparison to avoid double-counting.

Woollahra sells fewer homes than Waverley in almost every year on record — and moves more money doing it.

Look at dollar value instead of transaction count, and the picture inverts. Woollahra LGA — Double Bay, Darling Point, Point Piper, Bellevue Hill, Paddington, Watsons Bay — has out-valued Waverley in total dollars transacted every single year in this data set, despite the lower sales count. In 2025, Woollahra recorded $5.35 billion in settled transactions against Waverley’s $3.96 billion, on roughly 1,094 sales versus 1,337. That’s the prestige premium in numbers: fewer, larger transactions carrying a disproportionate share of the market’s total value.

Source: property sales register, verified sale prices only. Batch-recorded development site transactions and one confirmed data-entry outlier excluded.

Where growth held, and where it gave ground

Median house prices across five suburbs show just how uneven this cycle has been at street level. Double Bay is the standout — a steady climb from $4.8 million in 2020 to $11 million so far in 2026, the only one of the five still setting new highs this year. Bronte and Bondi both peaked around 2024–2025 and have eased modestly since. Woollahra and Vaucluse both show a sharper pattern: strong gains into 2022–2023, a pullback in 2024, then a partial recovery in 2025 before softening again this year.

I’ve left Point Piper out of this chart deliberately. It sells as few as four to six houses a year, and a handful of sales at that end of the market can swing the median by tens of millions of dollars — useful as a curiosity, not as a trend line. That’s a data discipline point as much as a market one: the smaller the suburb sample, the less any single year’s median tells you.

Source: property sales register, median house sale price by suburb and year, verified prices only.

The number that matters most: total value transacted

Volume and median price each tell part of the story, but total dollar value transacted is the number I keep coming back to, because it captures both at once. The Eastern Suburbs market roughly doubled in total value from $5.23 billion in 2020 to $9.94 billion in 2021, pulled back to $7.72 billion during the 2022 tightening shock, then climbed steadily for three straight years to a record $12.08 billion in 2025.

2026’s first seven months have produced $3.55 billion. Annualised, that’s the first year since the 2022 correction where total value transacted looks set to fall short of the year before it — and it’s happening at the same time the cash rate has returned to its 2023 peak and unemployment has drifted higher than at any point since 2021.

Source: property sales register, sum of verified sale prices, houses and units, Woollahra and Waverley LGAs. 2026 figure covers January to July.

The market has changed. Not collapsed — changed. And the agents still running a 2021 playbook are the ones who haven’t noticed yet.

What the resale record actually shows

Beyond the aggregate numbers, I looked for genuine repeat sales — the same property changing hands twice within this data set — to check whether the growth suggested by median prices holds up at the level of an individual home. Most of what I found needed to be discarded: pairs showing gains well above forty per cent a year almost always turn out to be a knockdown-rebuild, a subdivision, or a change in what was actually being sold, not organic capital growth, and I won’t quote them as if they were.

What’s left is more modest, and more honest. A Bondi house that traded in mid-2021 and again in early 2025 gained just 11 per cent over almost four years — a period that, on paper, included one of the strongest markets on record. A Bellevue Hill unit held for roughly the same span gained closer to 48 per cent, a healthier but still unspectacular annual return once you spread it across nearly four years of ownership. Neither number is dramatic. Both are a more accurate read of what buying and holding in this market has actually delivered than the headline medians suggest.

Six years on from the lowest interest rates this market has ever seen, the Eastern Suburbs remain one of the most resilient property markets in the country — but resilience isn’t the same as momentum. In my view, 2026 is the first year since the 2022 shock where the data and the mood in the market are telling the same story: fewer transactions, a slower pace of price growth, and buyers who are taking longer to commit. That’s not a reason to sit on the sidelines. It’s a reason to be more deliberate about how a property is positioned, priced and presented — which, six years into a market that keeps rewarding judgement over volume, is exactly where an independent, strategy-led approach earns its place.

This article is based on publicly available property transaction data and figures published by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, believed accurate as at the date of publication. It is provided for general information only and does not constitute financial, investment or legal advice. Past sale prices and market trends are not a guarantee of future performance. Readers considering a property decision should seek independent professional advice specific to their circumstances.