The spring scorecard: where growth scores moved most
Re-scoring all 15,300 suburbs on 7 September moved 214 of them by more than ten points, with three markets accelerating hard and two well-known inner-city addresses losing ground.
The re-score, in brief
On 7 September we ran the spring refresh across the full index, all 15,300 suburbs, updated against the latest sales, rental and approvals data. Most of them barely moved. Growth scores are built to be sticky between the annual January re-fit and the quarterly refreshes in between, so a shift of two or three points in either direction is normal noise, not news.
214 suburbs moved by ten points or more. That is roughly 1.4% of the index, small as a share of the total but concentrated in a handful of recognisable patterns: outer-metro Perth and Adelaide suburbs where rental scarcity is biting, Brisbane’s Olympic corridor where momentum keeps compounding, and pockets of inner Melbourne where the numbers have gone quiet.
Three suburbs pulling away
Midland, WA is the clearest scarcity story in the sample. Vacancy sits at 0.5% and stock is selling in 10 days, among the fastest turnover we track anywhere. Twelve-month growth is running at 16.0% on a $490,000 median, helped along by the METRONET station upgrade and the new St John of God hospital, which feed both listing scarcity and infrastructure investment into the score.
Fortitude Valley, QLD posted the largest single jump: a growth score of 80 on 19.8% twelve-month growth. This is a unit market moving on Cross River Rail and Olympic-precinct spending, not rental tightness. Vacancy has actually loosened to 2.5% and days on market has stretched to 55, so sales momentum and infrastructure are doing the work here, which is also why risk is rated Medium rather than Low.
Palmerston, NT leads the index on raw momentum: 22.3% twelve-month growth, a 6.3% yield and vacancy of 0.8%. Interstate investor inquiry into the suburb is up 94% year on year on our tracking. When rental demand, scarcity and population growth all point the same way at once, the score moves fast.
| Suburb | State | Growth score | 12-month growth | Vacancy | Days on market |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palmerston | NT | 78 | +22.3% | 0.8% | 15 |
| Fortitude Valley | QLD | 80 | +19.8% | 2.5% | 55 |
| Midland | WA | 66 | +16.0% | 0.5% | 10 |
| Footscray | VIC | 65 | -2.1% | 2.1% | 36 |
| Sunshine | VIC | 62 | -1.3% | 1.8% | 35 |
Where the ground shifted the other way
Not every mover is a riser. Footscray and Sunshine, both inner-west Melbourne, recorded negative twelve-month growth of -2.1% and -1.3% respectively, and both slipped in this re-score despite genuinely large infrastructure pipelines: a $1.5 billion new Footscray Hospital and the future Melbourne Airport Rail Link hub earmarked for Sunshine.
The infrastructure case for both suburbs is intact. What moved was momentum and turnover, the two inputs that react first when a broader market cools.
Days on market has stretched into the mid-30s in both suburbs, and vacancy has drifted up to 1.8-2.1%, well above the sub-1% readings coming out of Perth and Adelaide this quarter. Stability scores for both remain high, 78 for Footscray and 75 for Sunshine, which is the model’s way of saying the long-run case hasn’t changed even though the near-term score has softened.
What’s driving the split
The pattern across all five suburbs is consistent with how the score is built. Sales momentum (18% of the score) and days on market (12%) react within a quarter. Infrastructure investment (11%) and jobs access (10%) barely shift at all between re-fits. So when a growth score jumps or drops by ten points inside a few months, momentum and turnover are almost always doing the heavy lifting, for better or worse.
The bottom line
Fast movers this spring cluster where scarcity, momentum and infrastructure spending line up in the same direction, as in Palmerston, Fortitude Valley and Midland. Where a market cools, as in Footscray and Sunshine, the drop usually reflects near-term turnover rather than a change in the underlying case, so it pays to read the growth score alongside stability before drawing conclusions.