Market Sensitivities and Growth Differentials Across Australian Housing Markets

Abstract

Australian house prices have risen strongly since the mid-1990s, but growth has been highly uneven across regions. Raw growth figures obscure whether these differences reflect persistent structural trends or cyclical fluctuations. We address this by estimating a three-factor model in levels for regional repeat-sales log price indexes over 1995-2024. The model decomposes each regional index into a national Market factor, two stationary spreads (Mining and Lifestyle) that capture mean-reverting geographic cycles, and a city-specific residual. The Mining spread, proxied by a Perth-Sydney index differential, reflects resource-driven oscillations in relative performance; the Lifestyle spread captures amenity-driven coastal and regional cycles. The Market loading isolates each region's fundamental sensitivity, beta, to national growth, so that a city's growth under an assumed national change is calculated from its beta once mean-reverting spreads are netted out. Comparing realised paths to these factor-implied trajectories indicates when a city is historically elevated or depressed, and attributes the gap to Mining or Lifestyle spreads. Expanding-window ARIMAX estimation reveals that Market betas are stable across major shocks (the mining boom, the Global Financial Crisis, and COVID-19), while Mining and Lifestyle behave as stationary spreads that widen forecast funnels without overturning the cross-sectional ranking implied by beta. Melbourne amplifies national growth, Sydney tracks the national trend closely, and regional areas dampen it. The framework thus provides a simple, factor-based tool for interpreting regional growth differentials and their persistence.