Are Dee Why Units Really Booming? Or Time To Buy?

September 2, 2026

Hurrah, Sydney property is finally falling, after a couple of years of interest hikes and an interesting budget night. Cotality's August index put Sydney values down 1.4% in the month and 7.1% below their February peak, the fifth straight monthly fall nationally. Domain had auction clearance at 48% in the June quarter, the weakest since April 2020.

Sydney continued to lead the pace of declines, with home values down 1.4 per cent in August to be 7.1 per cent below peak levels recorded in February.

- ABC News, 1 September 2026

I'm moving back to Syd after a few years away, and have been looking at Dee Why to be near family. Curiously, every suburb profile told me units there were actually UP ~11% on the year. Why would that be? Could they have been up 20% prior to the budget, then dropped down to 11? Or are they outliers?

Turns out Cotality's 1.4% downturn is only one month, and most of the popular suburb pages tracking is yearly. So for the year, PropTrack's index puts Sydney overall down 3.6%, with Domain putting Sydney units at +2.5% for the year (so apartments > houses). Even so, Dee Why units at +11% is way clear of 2.5%. I wanted to dive into the data.

Dee Why 12-month price changes, by source

On units they roughly agree, up 10 to 12%, and on houses they are all over the place from -5.2% to +2.8%.

Fortunately for us, NSW publishes every single sale, free, updated weekly. So I stopped reading suburb pages and pulled the sales.

Across 2023 to 2025 units are up 18.7% and houses are up 15.5%. Both climbing, within a few points of each other, with houses leading the charge in 2024, but units leapfrogging in 2025.

So where does the 11% come from?

Let's go more granular. Pulled back to 2020, the same pattern runs in reverse: units climbed from about $770,000 to $920,000 while the cash rate fell to 0.10%, then stalled as the 2022 hikes landed. Through 2024 the unit monthly median sat between $900,000 and $1 million.

Then the RBA cut rates, and in March 2025 it climbed to roughly $1.05 to $1.2 million and stayed in that band for a year. It looks like that single step is where the 11% comes from.

And then came budget night (or did it?)

Budget night was May 12th, but April had already fallen 17.3% to $1,015,000 off the March peak of $1,227,500. Were people frontrunning the budget rumours, trying to get ahead of a crash? That April print lands before the Budget and before the May 6 hike that took the cash rate from 4.10% to 4.35%. May fell another 10.1% to $912,500, leaving units 25.7% below the March peak on the monthly read. Now units are down 14.6% from the March quarter, houses down 19.0%, the first real fall in the data.

So was it the hikes? The budget? Fear? Probably a mix of the 3. As I write this the talk is of a fourth rate hike. The Budget on 12 May replaced the 50% CGT discount with indexation plus a 30% minimum tax, and killed negative gearing on anything bought after 7:30pm that night (with exceptions). CBA reckoned the negative gearing change alone was "equivalent to roughly a 90-155 basis point increase in investor mortgage rates in immediate cash-flow terms".

Sydney peaked somewhere in the first quarter of 2026. Cotality's September release dates it to February, and PropTrack puts the national peak in March. Dee Why units peaked in the March quarter for sure before some big tumbles.

So why do the suburb pages still say up 11%?

To really check their data, I tried to recreate their number off the raw sales data. Here's rolling twelve-month median unit price, year on year.

This cycle peaks at +16.7% in February 2026 and we're down to +5.8% by July. The suburb pages sit inside that slide depending on when each of them last refreshed, which is also why they disagree with each other. My data is not contradicting them. It reproduces their number, and then shows it falling out from under them all year.

So that's the gap. The suburb pages are outdated. Why can't they update their numbers more quickly? I do not know. It's pretty misleading for buyers and sellers. Do they act more quickly when the numbers look good? I don't know, maybe that's getting too cynical.

The units-versus-houses split is real, by the way, just smaller than those pages suggest. PropTrack has Sydney houses 5.8% below peak against 3.2% for units, and Domain has Sydney units down 1.5% in the June quarter, their first quarterly fall in two years. Units are falling more slowly than houses. They are not rising.

My takeaway? If you're checking a suburb page to work out what is happening now, you're reading a number that's mostly about last year. My sales data is two months behind, which is annoying, but two months beats twelve.

Note: why is my data 2 months behind? Well for some reason (settlement durations?), sales take a median 52 days to turn up in the public records, so recent months are still filling in. July is on the chart in grey because it has 28 unit sales against a typical 49. And I first ran this in late August with the June median at $987,500 off 130 sales; two more weeks of published sales took it to $965,000 off 133. If you know how to get fresher data or what's the cause of the delay, I'd love to hear it.

In future I'd like to run the same thing on a suburb with a different investor mix. If the Budget is doing more of the work than the rate hikes, it should show up harder somewhere with a higher % of landlords. Where would that be?

So should you buy now?

Who knows. You're trying to time the market, which generally I avoid. You're also probably getting 6+% interest rates, so your buying power might not have increased that much. That would be another interesting angle, how buying power changes over time with interest rates and property prices (do they balance out? I'd guess a little but not completely). The other risk is if we're in a bubble and the whole economy goes boom. Also curious, have rent prices followed the same pattern? Do you get more or less for your buck today compared to making interest payments? Regardless, even with this little tumble, a 2-bedder in Dee Why is well out of the budget for this guy.