Everyone wants to buy property at the bottom of the market. The problem is that nobody knows exactly when that bottom has arrived until it has already passed.

Identifying a rising or falling property market is relatively straightforward. In a downturn, listings accumulate, properties take longer to sell, and vendors become more willing to negotiate. In a rising market, inspections become busier, properties sell quickly, and buyers face increasing competition.

But how do you pick the bottom of the property market—the shift from falling prices to a recovery? Some of the best clues emerge at open homes, auctions and negotiating tables well before they appear in published statistics.

Why is the market bottom so difficult to identify?

One challenge is that much of the information used to measure property prices is retrospective. A suburb’s median price may reflect contracts negotiated weeks or months earlier, with further delays as sales settle and are recorded.

Some measures, including capital-city home value indices and auction results, are published more frequently. But they can be volatile and may conceal quite different conditions across individual suburbs and property types.

Markets also rarely recover uniformly. Well-located, quality houses may attract renewed competition while compromised properties continue to struggle. What looks like a stagnant market in the headline figures can conceal a change in demand for the homes buyers actually want.

The bottom, therefore, is often a period of stabilisation rather than an identifiable day. By the time a sustained recovery is confirmed, the buying environment may have already changed.

What does the bottom of a property market look like?

One of the earliest signals is not rising prices. It’s that properties stop becoming progressively harder to sell.

Imagine a house that sits unsold for six weeks. The agent follows up repeatedly, the vendor reduces the asking price, and eventually accepts a discounted offer. A few months later, a comparable house attracts several genuine buyers and sells within a fortnight. Its price might be similar, but something important has changed: buyers are competing again.

Vendors may begin rejecting offers they would previously have considered. Marketing campaigns shorten. Good properties sell while less appealing homes still languish on the market. These are not conclusive signs on their own, but if they repeat across several properties, they may point to a shifting balance between buyers and sellers.

What buyers’ agents notice before the statistics

This is where firsthand market knowledge can be particularly useful. As buyers’ agents, we inspect properties, attend open homes, speak with selling agents and negotiate purchases week after week. That provides a view of buyer and seller behaviour that isn’t immediately visible in a quarterly report.

• Inspection attendance: Are open homes noticeably busier? Are buyers returning for second inspections?
• Phone calls and follow-up: Are agents repeatedly chasing feedback and offers, or do they need less follow-up?
• Email campaigns: Are we receiving repeated reminders, price reductions and renewed marketing for listings that have stalled?
• Off-market approaches: Are agents proactively contacting us about properties whose owners want a quiet or quicker sale?
• Language and pricing: Are conversations about ‘motivated vendors’ and ‘room to negotiate’, or about competing offers and firm price expectations?
• Negotiation outcomes: Are discounted offers still working, or are sellers holding out because other buyers are interested?

The direction of these signals matters more than any one call or inspection. Agents use different approaches, and off-market sales are not automatically evidence of weakness. But when patterns change across numerous properties and agencies, they can offer an early indication of a turning market.

This regular exposure is one advantage of an experienced buyer’s agent: we can compare what is happening today with the behaviour we observed only a few weeks earlier.

Which statistics help confirm a turning point?

Published data still matters. Rather than looking for one magic indicator, consider several measures together:

• Stock on market: Falling unsold inventory is more encouraging when sales volumes are rising, rather than owners simply withdrawing listings.
• Sales volumes: More completed transactions can signal that buyers are returning and absorbing available stock.
• Vendor discounting: Smaller discounts between asking prices and agreed prices suggest sellers are gaining negotiating power.
• Auction activity: Improving clearance rates and genuine bidder participation over several weeks may indicate stronger demand.
• Days on market: Shorter marketing campaigns and quicker sales can reveal changes before median prices do.
• Price momentum: A decline slowing from, say, 1.5% to 0.2% per month is still a fall, but suggests that the downward momentum is easing.

None should be assessed in isolation. Low stock can simply reflect fewer new listings. A strong auction result may be unrepresentative when only a handful of properties go under the hammer. Greater confidence comes when several independent indicators improve together.

The COVID property market: why waiting became expensive

The early COVID-19 period provides a striking example of how difficult it is to time a market. In 2020, business closures, unemployment concerns and predictions of significant property price falls made postponing a purchase seem sensible to many buyers.

Prices initially declined. CoreLogic reported that Australian dwelling values fell 2.1% from April to September 2020. But the downturn was surprisingly short. Record-low interest rates, government support, stronger household savings and limited housing supply helped fuel a rapid recovery.

CoreLogic subsequently reported a 24.6% increase in national dwelling values between March 2020 and February 2022. That was a national figure, not a forecast or the experience of every individual property, but it illustrates the stakes. Someone who waited for much larger falls may instead have returned to a far more expensive market.

The lesson? A market bottom can arrive when confidence is at its weakest. Waiting until conditions feel safe and the recovery is widely recognised may mean that some of the opportunity has already gone.

Brisbane in 2023: recovery before confidence returned

Brisbane’s downturn following the interest-rate rises of 2022 offers a more local example. By early 2023, borrowing costs were much higher, and many buyers expected further falls.

Yet downward price momentum was easing. CoreLogic figures showed Brisbane dwelling values falling by approximately 1.4% in January 2023 and 0.4% in February, before returning to modest growth in March and April. The shift occurred even though interest rates remained elevated.

For active buyers, the useful questions were more immediate: Were more people attending inspections? Were vendors resisting discounts? Were better properties attracting multiple offers? Such changes can precede confirmation in broader price data.

The lesson is not that every slowing downturn will reverse. It is that a recovery can begin before the economic outlook feels particularly encouraging.

Beware the false bottom

A brief improvement does not guarantee a lasting recovery. Markets can stabilise temporarily and then resume falling—a false bottom.

Clearance rates may rise simply because fewer properties are auctioned. Stock can shrink because vendors withdraw rather than sell. A few exceptional sales can make a suburb appear stronger than it is, while more visitors at inspections do not necessarily translate into offers.

Further rate rises, weaker employment or tighter credit could also derail an emerging recovery. Look for sustained changes across several measures, property types, and agents, rather than letting one impressive weekend dictate a buying decision.

Should you try to buy at the exact bottom?

There is a meaningful difference between recognising improving opportunities and identifying the absolute lowest price. The first is a reasonable aim. The second requires a substantial amount of luck.

Even if you correctly identify a city’s market bottom, that doesn’t mean any particular home is good value. A compromised property bought cheaply can remain a poor investment; a well-located, functional home bought at a fair price can prove a sound long-term purchase even if values soften further in the short term.

For most buyers, a better strategy is to focus on selecting the right asset, negotiating the best defensible price and holding it long enough to ride out normal market cycles. Your finances and circumstances need to support that timeframe.

The value of experience

At Your Property Hound, we don’t pretend to predict the market with certainty. Our role is to interpret current conditions, compare properties carefully and help clients avoid overpaying or compromising on the wrong asset.

Regular involvement in inspections, discussions with selling agents and negotiations across Brisbane and the Gold Coast gives us a perspective that broad, backward-looking statistics cannot always provide. It helps us identify when buying conditions are genuinely changing—and when apparent signals might be misleading.

Final thoughts

The clearest proof that a property market has bottomed generally arrives after the event. But improving competition, shorter campaigns, shrinking unsold stock alongside stronger sales, reduced discounting and slowing price declines can offer useful early clues.

Ultimately, the goal shouldn’t be to wait indefinitely for a perfect entry point. It’s to secure the right property at a fair price, with a long-term plan that doesn’t depend on calling the market’s exact bottom.