Every April we ask the same question: where are the deals actually happening, not where is the media saying they're happening? The answer this month is more nuanced than usual — and worth ten minutes of your time before you make any move in Q2.
The big picture in two minutes
Capital city growth has cooled almost everywhere. Sydney is functionally flat (−0.3% over the rolling quarter), Melbourne is still working through stock overhang, and Perth — the darling of 2024 — has handed back roughly a quarter of its 18-month run. None of this is a crash. It's a market doing what a market does after a long upward leg.
Regional Queensland is the outlier. Specifically the corridor we've been buying in for two years — Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Gladstone — is still clipping along at 0.6–0.9% per month, supported by population inflow that hasn't slowed and a rental market that is genuinely tight (1.1% vacancy, vs 2.3% national). It's not the easy money it was in 2023, but it's not finished either.
What we're buying this month
Three deals settled for clients in April. The common thread:
- Sub-$650K entry price. The sweet spot for borrowing-capacity buyers right now is that lower band — anything above $750K is having to compete for fewer buyers and the negotiating leverage is real.
- Yield north of 5.8% gross. Servicing math has gotten tighter with the rate moves, and a strong yield is the difference between a property that holds itself and one that needs feeding from elsewhere.
- Established three-bedroom houses on 600m²+ blocks. Not the highest-growth segment historically, but the most defensible cash-flow profile in a market where we expect another 9–12 months of slow grind before the next leg up.
What we passed on
We turned down three deals in April that on the surface looked fine. Worth naming why, because the patterns are instructive:
Brisbane inner-ring townhouse, $720K. The numbers worked on paper. But body-corp fees had jumped 14% in 18 months, and we couldn't get a clean answer on the special-levy schedule. Rule of thumb — if the seller is being vague about strata costs, walk.
Mining-town freestanding, $410K, 9% gross yield. Tempting, and the rental market is currently strong. But we wrote a piece in October 2024 about why we don't buy in single-industry towns regardless of yield, and nothing has changed. Yields fall when industries fall.
Adelaide western suburbs, $650K. Solid fundamentals, fine valuation, but our client could buy two QLD properties for the same outlay with similar growth profile. Concentration risk — we said no on portfolio strategy grounds, not deal grounds.
Saying "we said no to three deals" is easy to write. The hard part for any buyer's agent is explaining to a client why we're not transacting in a month they were hoping to buy. If you're a client of ours and we've told you to wait — this is why. Doing nothing is a real strategy.
The mistake we're watching first-home investors make
The single most common pattern we're seeing in clarity calls in 2026: first-home investors stretching their borrowing capacity to buy in Sydney or Melbourne because "that's where everyone says you should buy your first investment". They're buying $850K apartments yielding 3.4% and assuming capital growth will bail them out.
It might. But three things have changed since that playbook worked:
- Apartment supply in inner Sydney and Melbourne is at decade-high levels.
- The growth gap between houses and apartments has stretched to 18 percentage points over the rolling 5 years.
- Cash-flow drag at current rates means a stretched first investment can lock you out of the second purchase for 4–5 years, which is the move that actually builds the portfolio.
Our advice — and this is what we're saying on calls every week — is to start with cash-flow-strong, growth-decent regional fundamentals, then leverage equity into the higher-growth purchases later. The "buy where you'd live" rule was never a portfolio rule. It was a homebuyer rule. They're different jobs.
What we're watching in May
The RBA meeting on the 6th. We're not in the business of predicting rate moves, but the market is currently pricing in a 60% chance of a hold — and the language out of governor Lowe (sorry, Bullock) has been more dovish than the data suggests. If they hold, expect borrowing capacity to lift slightly. If they cut, expect the QLD corridor we've been buying in to firm faster than the capitals will respond.
Either way: the deals are still there if you're patient. They're just not the obvious ones.
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