Brisbane pays for its popularity See page 60 for shortcuts to owning a home.

The Queensland capital has overtaken Melbourne as Australia’s third most expensive city for property following substantial price increases throughout the pandemic.

An analysis by CoreLogic revealed that between March 2020 and December 2023 the median dwelling value in Greater Brisbane rose by 50.2% from $524,113 to $787,217. By contrast, values in Melbourne rose by just 11% over the period to $780,457.

“The city’s appeal amid an increase in remote work helped fuel strong population growth, increasing housing demand, driving down supply and making it a seller’s market,” says Eliza Owen, the head of research at CoreLogic.

However, Melbourne still has higher individual median house and unit values ($948,041 and $610,122 respectively) than Brisbane ($875,991 and $561,016).

Owen says this is down to the property make-up of each city. “Melbourne has a higher share of units as a portion of the dwelling market. CoreLogic estimates that units comprise 33.8% of Melbourne dwellings, compared to 25.6% of homes across Brisbane.”

Because units generally have a lower value than detached houses, a higher portion of units brings down the median for all dwellings. Sydney remains the most expensive capital city with a median dwelling price of about $1.13 million, while Canberra sits in second spot with a median just shy of $850,000.

Over the past year, CoreLogic’s national home value index increased by 8.7% as a result of strong growth in Perth, Brisbane and Sydney, in particular, though values fell in Darwin and Hobart.

$263,104 Increase in the median Brisbane dwelling value since March 2020. Source: CoreLogic

Small caps, big reward? That’s often been the thinking around smaller companies listed on the ASX in relation to their larger counterparts, but research by Morningstar has shown this is not necessarily the case.

As part of the analysis, Morningstar looked at the performance of the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries index and the S&P/ASX 200 index over the past 23 years and found that the latter has delivered roughly double the return over the period.

For instance, a $10,000 investment into the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries when it launched in 2000 would have grown to $30,051 by September 2023. On the other hand, the same investment in the S&P/ASX 200 would have grown to $59,050.

Beyond that long-term performance gap, Morningstar also found that small caps consistently underperformed large caps over rolling one, three, five, seven and 10 years.

“While there are rolling periods where the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries has outperformed, it has generally delivered lower returns with higher risk than the S&P/ASX 200, suggesting the size premium is time-period dependent in the local market, at least at the index level,” says Callan Maclennan, the research analyst who authored the report.