The Australian Stock Exchange and property data providers today launched a capital city home value index tracking home prices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The index, backed by property group RP Data-Rismark, will ”impute” the value of all dwellings in Australia’s capital cities and include daily price updates from homes sales across the country.
Previously data tracking the movement of house price has only been available on a monthly or quarterly basis from a range of providers such as RP Data, Australian Property Monitors and the Real Estate Institute of Victoria.
Advances in computing technology now allowed daily ”real time” updates, RP Data research director Tim Lawless said. The new index shows capital city dwelling values in February rose by 0.8 per cent, after a 1 per cent fall in January.
Home values jumped by 5 per cent in Darwin, 2.2 per cent in Hobart, 1.8 per cent in Melbourne, 1.9 per cent in Canberra, 1 per cent in Adelaide and 0.8 per cent in Sydney to the end of February.
They fell 0.1 per cent in Brisbane and 1.8 per cent in Perth. The daily capital city house price index will also account for the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, land area and location of a property to allow for ”accurate analysis of true value movements across specific housing markets,” RP Data said.
Only 6 per cent of Australian homes are sold each year. Of those, about 1390 are traded across the country each day with most transactions weighted towards weekends.
Australia’s residential housing market is worth an estimated $4 trillion, about three times the value of the $1.2 trillion equities market and the $1.3 trillion held in superannuation funds, Mr Lawless said.