By Leith van Onselen
It looks like I jumped the gun on Friday when I reported the March home price results from RP Data-Rismark. It turns out that I should have waited for Saturday’s results, which have only just been released. The below table shows how Australian home prices ended up for the month of March, along with a chart showing the movements in Australia’s major capital cities and nationally:
Overall, national capital city home prices rose by +0.18% in the month. Clearly, Perth’s housing market was the star performer in March and Adelaide’s the laggard. Sydney and Brisbane also achieved some growth, partly offset by falls in Melbourne.
As noted on Friday, RP Data-Rismark’s daily index is not seasonally adjusted. And according to the 2010 and 2011 March house price releases from RP Data-Rismark (see here and here), the seasonally adjusted result was between -0.2% and -0.3% lower than the unadjusted (non-seasonally adjusted) figure, implying that Australian dwelling values typically rise during the month of March.
Assuming an adjustment for seasonality implies that national capital city home prices remained more or less “flat” in the month of March.
Turning now to the daily movement for 2 April 2012, the below table provides the index values for each major capital city and nationally:
Comparing this table to the end-March table above provides the ‘daily movement’, which is charted below:
Clearly, there is quite some volatility in the RP Data-Rismark series, with Adelaide home prices apparently rising by nearly half a percent in one day, and Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth home prices also showing some significant changes in values.
The weekly movements have also been large, with Adelaide home prices rising by a whopping +0.73% and Brisbane’s falling by -0.42% (see below chart).
