Anyone care to actually look at REIV's figures, rather than read the newspapers? If you do, you will see that newspapers are doing a lot of extrapolating to get their screaming headlines. Some of the suburb-by-suburb results are absurd, ie:
Toorak - Down 25% in one quarter? Rubbish. When you look at upper and lower quartile numbers for that suburb, you see that no high-value properties sold in the quarter. Therefore, the reported median was wayyyy lower than a truly representative sample.
Black Rock - Up 32% in one quarter? Again, rubbish. The reason is the same as for the Toorak example above, except it was mostly quality properties that sold, not lower-end properties.
In summary, the suburb-by-suburb samples are not statistically representative for some suburbs this quarter. Volumes are way down on 12 months ago (40% - 50%) which doesnt help if stats are being used to measure suburb price movements. Overall though, prices are down, but thats about all you can I say, in my opinion.
