The quarterly data for the March 2015 Quarter shows what many had already known in that the market has been a lot quieter in the last quarter for sales and rental vacancy have risen in almost every jurisdiction. But there is some interesting data contained within this quarter, in particular the sizeable rise in the median price of houses in the Greater Darwin area which moved up by 6.8 per cent this past quarter to $625,000 – almost on par with the same time last year.

However this is a bit of an anomaly that can occur with median pricing. What people should note is that the house sales volume has fallen by 19.4 per cent to 275 sales for the quarter and of those 153 were above the $600,000 mark with a further 105 between $450,000 and $600,000. So the bulk of the house sales that occurred in the March Quarter were predominantly in the higher dollar bracket, thereby artificially pushing up the median.

Unit and Townhouse sales were less affected by this with a rise in the median of just 1.0 per cent to take the median price in Greater Darwin to $500,000. However, after three very strong preceding sales quarters, the sales volume in the March 2015 Quarter fell by 35.6 per cent.

Both landlords and tenants would have noticed some changes in the rental market over the last two quarters. The overall vacancy rate, which measures a combination of house and unit vacancy for the Darwin area taking in the Northern Suburbs, has moved up to 6.4 per cent which is an increase of 1.0 percent from the last quarter but up 2.6 per cent on the same time last year. The highest overall rate in recent years was 6.9 percent in March 2004. Breaking that down, house vacancies have increased in Darwin and Northern Suburbs by 2.3 per cent to 6.7 per cent and unit vacancies in the same area are up just 0.5 per cent from the last quarter to 6.3 per cent.

What is interesting with this statistic is that the vacancy rate for houses is the same as it was in June 2014, but most people have forgotten that and are looking at this current rate as abnormal. The highest vacancy rate that the REINT has on record for houses in Darwin and Northern Suburbs was 10 per cent in September 1999.

Where we are seeing some quite high vacancy rates is in Palmerston. The house vacancy rate has moved up to 7.9 per cent, which is the highest since March 2011 when it was 10 per cent, but certainly not the highest on record which was December 2001 at 15.7 per cent. Rental prices have fallen pretty much across the board with the exception of the Palmerston market where we saw a small increase in rent prices. The largest drop in rents is evident in the Inner Darwin market with one bedroom units dropping by 5.6 per cent and three bedroom houses dropping by 12.5 per cent.

Katherine rents also took a sizeable drop with 1 bedroom units falling by 14.8 per cent but otherwise it was a mixed bag in Katherine. Alice Springs was the same with rents falling on two bedroom units but rising across the rest of the unit market, and falling substantially on three and four bedroom houses, as much as 6 per cent on four bedroom houses.

The volume of house sales has decreased in Palmerston but the median price of houses has risen to $565,000. The inverse was evident in the unit market in Palmerston where the volume rose by 9.4 per cent with the median reducing to $430,000.

In Alice Springs there have been sizeable drops in house and unit sales with both dropping by over 40 per cent. Interestingly while the volume of house sales dropped by 40 per cent this quarter, that is still nearly 30 per cent higher than at the same time last year.

The median house price has also fallen in Alice Springs, coming off by 3.4 per cent to $443,750 and the unit median dropped a sizeable 11.3 per cent for the quarter to list at $330,000. House vacancy rates in Alice Springs are almost unchanged from the last quarter moving up by just 0.6 per cent to 6.4 per cent. And the unit vacancy actually fell by 1.1 per cent to 7.8 per cent.