The Regions in Our Core Index Set

When we developed our core index set, one of the most important decisions was which regions to include. This choice affects fundamentally shapes the conclusions we reach and how we communicate about Australia's property market. Neoval's core set includes:

• 22 Significant Urban Areas (SUAs): 7 capital cities and 15 key regional centres.
• Every Statistical Area Level 4 (SA4) region inside each Greater Capital City (GCC).

This set isn't as granular as the Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2) indices that we use for suburb-level analysis. Still, it offers a valuable middle ground. We can highlight regional differences without overwhelming detail. It is more useful than the traditional GCC indices which suffer from being too geographically broad, masking intra-city variation, and ignoring regional diversity.

This article benefits from knowledge of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) statistical areas. Their website gives the full details and their mapping tool is terrific.

NOTE: This article uses data from March 2025. To see the most up-to-date data, please see our most recent monthly update.

Why Greater Capital City Indices Fall Short

To understand why we chose our particular approach, it's worth examining how property indices are typically constructed. Most Australian property reporting relies on GCC indices, but this approach has some significant flaws.

GCC Boundaries Are Too Broad

The boundaries of GCC areas extend far beyond what many see as the actual city boundary. For example, Greater Sydney includes the Central Coast and the Blue Mountains. Greater Brisbane covers Caboolture, and Greater Perth includes Mandurah.

The ABS designed GCC areas for long-term job market analysis. They've ended up as the standard for property price reporting. This is because it's easier to make an index on a bigger region with more data, rather than because it is a useful way to look at property markets.

Oversized boundaries distort property market analysis and lead to misleading and incorrect data. Greater Sydney's inclusion of the Central Coast, for example, means that price movements in this area get mixed in with city trends. This masks the distinct market conditions that buyers and investors actually experience.

Regional Diversity Gets Lost In The GCC Specification

The GCC specification also creates broad 'Rest of State' regions. These are often used for reporting on a state's regional price movements. Queensland's 'Rest of QLD' covers all areas outside Greater Brisbane. This includes the Gold Coast (Australia's sixth largest city), Cairns, and Mount Isa, despite their vastly different characteristics.

The same problem occurs in each state. In NSW, the variation is stark: over three years, house prices rose 22% in Muswellbrook, 5% in Bathurst, 1.5% in Orange, and fell 0.5% in Byron Bay. A single 'Rest of NSW' figure (5% growth) would mask this variation entirely.

Capital Cities Contain Distinct Submarkets

Capital cities contain vastly different property markets that GCC indices fail to distinguish. Property values and market dynamics vary significantly from suburb to suburb within each city.

SA4-level data starts to reveal the intra-city variation that GCCs mask. In Sydney, house prices differ by over 3x between the South West ($1.2M) and Eastern Suburbs ($3.7M). These are separate markets, yet the 'Greater Sydney' index combines them.

Neoval's Core Index Regions

Given the limitations with the GCC approach, we designed our core index to avoid these pitfalls. Our approach uses a selection of SUAs and SA4s to address the problems with GCC indices.

Significant Urban Areas - Capitals

The capital SUA set provides a high-level overview of the state capitals. Using the SUA definition has several benefits. Fundamentally, the SUA aligns more closely to the common understanding of the capital city boundaries. Secondly, the SUA capital indices compare readily to the regional SUA indices while still providing a familiar point of reference.

Significant Urban Areas - Regional

Our regional SUA indices focus on the biggest urban centre in each state, with a minimum of 25,000 residents. This approach ensures national coverage without skewing towards more populated states. Of the 102 SUAs we track, this sample combines geographic diversity with representation of significant population centres.

The SUA index set strategically covers 76% of Australia's population. It prioritises showcasing a diversity of regions, over covering the entire population. There are two big contributors to this:

• By selecting only the overall largest SUAs instead of the largest in each state, we would have covered a larger proportion of the population. However, this would have made our benchmark index set heavily skewed towards NSW, QLD, and VIC.
• While the majority of Australians live in the biggest cities, a significant fraction live in small towns..

Capital City SA4s

We use SA4 indices for each of the largest capital cities to gauge the evolution of intra-city markets.

A More Nuanced View Of Australia's Property Markets

Our monthly updates use this core index set to deliver a more accurate view of Australia's property markets than could be achieved with the Greater Capital City indices. By combining the national perspective of SUAs with the granular detail of SA4s within capitals, we can better capture both the broad trends and local variations that shape our property landscape.

This monthly index set provides a solid overview, but it's just a taste of what's possible. For specific questions about suburbs or regional analysis, we can dive into SA2-level data. We also track thousands of other regions that aren't in our regular updates. We currently produce over 5,100 indices across GCCs, SUAs, SA4s, SA3s, and SA2s. If you're interested in a specific region, please contact us and we'll be happy to help.