Four times a year we refresh the cycle position on every council area in the country and put it on the Momentum Dial. The July 2026 read is in, and one number does most of the talking.
Of the 452 council house markets we track, 401 are at or past peak growth. That is 89 per cent.
Thirty six are still rising. Seven are falling or at the bottom. Everything else is somewhere on the way down from the top.
Before anyone panics, read the next bit properly.
Past peak does not mean falling
Peak is a momentum reading, not a price prediction. It means growth is at its fastest point in the current cycle, so from here the rate of growth eases rather than the price dropping. A market can sit at peak for years and keep adding value the whole time. Ballarat has been reading Peak for a while and it is still compounding.
What it does mean is that the easy part is behind you. Buying into a market at peak is buying after the run, not before it. That is fine if you know that is what you are doing and you have a ten year horizon. It is not fine if you were told the market is “about to take off”.
The state map
Share of house markets at or past peak, July 2026:
| State | Markets tracked | At or past peak |
|---|---|---|
| SA | 63 | 100% |
| ACT | 1 | 100% |
| WA | 103 | 99% |
| QLD | 52 | 94% |
| TAS | 28 | 89% |
| NSW | 121 | 86% |
| VIC | 78 | 69% |
| NT | 6 | 50% |
South Australia has nowhere left that has not already peaked. Not one of its 63 council markets is still accelerating. Western Australia is one market off the same.
That matters because Perth and Adelaide have been the two markets everyone has been told to buy into for three years running. The data says that trade is finished, and it finished a while ago.
Victoria is the least peaked mainland state at 69 per cent. That is not me talking my own book because I buy here. It is the arithmetic of a state that went sideways for longer than everywhere else while the rest of the country ran.
Units are a cycle behind houses
This is the part almost nobody looks at.
| Phase | Houses | Units |
|---|---|---|
| Rising | 8% | 16% |
| Peak | 53% | 26% |
| Slowing | 36% | 46% |
| Bottom or recovering | 3% | 8% |
Twice as many unit markets are still rising, and half as many are at peak. Units in a lot of the country simply did not run the way houses did, so there is more of that cycle left.
I am not about to tell you to go and buy units. Land content is what appreciates, and a unit gives you very little of it, which is why our clients mostly end up in houses. But if you have been priced out of the house market in an area you actually believe in, the cycle position on units is worth a look before you write the area off.
Where is still rising, and the catch
The 36 house markets still accelerating are mostly coastal and alpine shires. Eurobodalla, Alpine, Yass Valley, Byron, Kiama, Snowy Monaro, South Gippsland.
Here is the catch, and it is a big one. The modelled twelve month range on Eurobodalla is minus 9 per cent to plus 16 per cent. That is a 25 point spread. The model is not saying “this will go up 16 per cent”. It is saying it genuinely does not know, and the honest reading of a band that wide is low confidence, not high upside.
Thin markets do that. A shire with a handful of sales a quarter will swing on almost nothing. Lifestyle markets also tend to be the first to stall when rates move, because the buyer is discretionary.
So no, the answer is not “buy Byron”. The answer is that the small number of markets still rising are mostly the ones where the data is least reliable.
What we do with this
We do not pick a market because it is at a particular point on the dial. There is no yield floor and no growth threshold that gets a suburb through the door. Every search starts from the client’s brief, and the cycle position is one input of many.
What the dial is genuinely good for is the negative screen. If someone comes to us set on a market that is 100 per cent past peak with a two per cent yield, we can show them where that sits before they spend money, instead of after.
Kate reckons I should stop showing people the dial at barbecues. She is probably right.
Read your own area
Every one of the 453 council areas has its own page with the cycle position, the population and jobs data, what is being approved, and the suburbs inside it. Start at the Momentum Dial or go straight to the market pages.
The readings above are as at July 2026 and get refreshed quarterly. Cycle data is sourced from HtAG Analytics, the same paid feed we use in client research.
If you want the written report on an area, ask on its page. One per person, I write them myself, and there is no charge.