The Spring Nobody Turned Up To: More Listings, Almost No New Sellers

Last week the property headlines ran a number: capital city listings are 24% higher than a year ago. Read that on its own and you picture a spring flood, vendors piling in, buyers spoiled for choice, prices buckling under the weight of supply.

Here's the problem. That number came out of Cotality's August Home Value Index, and the same release contains a second number almost nobody quoted: new listings are running about 8% below the five-year average. Sellers aren't arriving. The stock is just refusing to leave.

That distinction changes what you should do about it.

Two numbers that shouldn't be in the same market

Over the four weeks to 30 August, total advertised stock across the capitals sat roughly 8% above its five-year average, with around 137,000 properties on the market nationally. At the same time, the flow of new listings was running about 6% below where it was a year ago.

Sydney is the extreme case: new listings there have been tracking around 14% below the five-year average, with Melbourne about 9% below. The two biggest markets in the country, in the middle of the sharpest price falls of the cycle, and fewer people are putting homes up for sale than normal.

So where is the extra stock coming from? It isn't coming from anywhere. It's the same properties, staying listed longer. Quarterly sales volumes are running 15.5% below the same period last year and 11.5% below the five-year average, with Sydney, Brisbane and Perth each down more than 20% year-on-year. When 15% fewer homes sell and slightly fewer arrive, the pile grows anyway. That's arithmetic, not a seller stampede.

Why a stale market isn't the same as a glut

This matters because the two look identical on a listings chart and behave nothing alike.

In a genuine oversupply you have motivated vendors competing against each other for a normal pool of buyers. Prices fall, but transactions keep happening, because someone is always willing to clear stock. What Australia has instead is both sides stepping back at once. Gerard Burg, Cotality's Head of Research, put it bluntly last month: "It's only really a buyer's market because so many buyers have been pushed out."

The price data agrees. National values fell 0.9% in August, a fifth consecutive monthly decline, leaving them 3.6% below the March 2026 peak. The downturn also went from narrow to near-universal in a single season: 93% of capital city suburbs recorded a fall through winter, against 45.8% through autumn. Sydney is now 7.1% below its February peak, already a deeper fall than the entire 2022-23 correction managed, and that one took considerably longer to play out.

The spring that didn't turn up

Spring normally does one reliable thing to the Australian market: it adds new stock. Cotality's own historical figures put the typical national lift in new listings at around 14%. This year the season has opened with new listings sitting below their five-year average instead, which tells you how vendors are reading conditions.

Their logic isn't complicated. Selling into a falling market crystallises the fall, and most owners simply don't have to sell, so they don't. Meanwhile the national median vendor discount has widened to about 3.8%, a three-year high, and the median time to sell reached roughly 35 days over the three months to July. Every one of those data points is a vendor discovering that the price in their head belongs to a market that no longer exists.

Buyers have run the mirror-image calculation. As broker Bishnu Aryal described the mood last month: "They're not waiting because they can't buy. They're waiting because they think they'll get a much better deal if they're patient."

One side won't sell into weakness and the other won't buy before the bottom. That standoff, not a supply glut, is what's producing your 24%.

What this actually does to your negotiating position

If the stock is old rather than new, then days on market becomes the most valuable number in any listing. More useful than the price guide, the suburb median, or anything in the marketing copy.

A property listed last week has a vendor at peak confidence, priced off comparable sales that are already stale in a market shedding close to 1% a month. A property that has been sitting since June has a vendor who has watched two months of falls, has probably adjusted the guide at least once, and is carrying holding costs plus a growing suspicion that waiting is costing them money. That 3.8% median discount is an average across everything, including the quick clean sales. The aged tail sits well beyond it.

There's a catch, and it's why "just wait" isn't automatically the winning move. Your negotiating power is improving while your borrowing capacity does the opposite. The cash rate sits at 4.35% after three increases this year, all four major banks now expect it to reach 4.60%, and the RBA board meets on 28-29 September. Roy Morgan has mortgage stress at an 18-year high, with 32.5% of mortgage holders, around 1.79 million people, classified as at risk. Price leverage and approval capacity are moving in opposite directions, and whichever one binds first is the one that decides your outcome.

What to actually do about it

If you're buying: sort by time on market, not by price. Ask the agent for the listing date and whether the guide has already moved. Both answers are free and both tell you more than the asking price does. Get your finance sorted ahead of the September decision rather than after it, because the binding constraint in this market is what a lender will approve, not what's available to look at. Run your repayments at a rate above today's rather than at today's using our mortgage calculator, and check your ceiling honestly with the borrowing power estimator. And don't mistake a thin market for a cheap one.

If you're upgrading: this is the most favourable set of conditions in years, precisely because you're selling and buying inside the same falling market. The same percentage fall is worth more dollars on the more expensive side of the trade, and the gap between the two is where upgraders do well in a downturn.

If you're selling: "wait for spring" has already been tested this year and it didn't work. Waiting for buyers to return means waiting for rate relief, and no major bank currently forecasts a cut before 2027. Days on market compounds against you: the longer a listing sits, the more buyers treat the price as negotiable regardless of what the property is actually worth.

If you're staying put: five months of falls have moved your loan-to-value ratio whether you've looked or not. That matters before you refinance, access equity, or assume a lender still values your home where it sat in March. Worth checking against your current home loan position rather than assuming it's unchanged.