Prices Up? But sales volumes are down

""Real estate is a confidence thing and confidence gets zapped by uncertainty and all the information we've been getting from overseas and at home has certainly zapped confidence."  Mr Kardash also noted the median house price provided a limited snapshot of the property field, because the figure could often be skewed by an inordinate number of sales at either the low or top end of the market in a given time period.  Like Mr Matusik, he said the 4.7 per cent drop in the median house price in the 12 months to June this year reflected the majority of activity which occurred at the lower end of the market.

Mr Kardash said the Brisbane market was on the "cusp of improvement", although he noted the middle price range remained relatively stagnate.

"Just recently the market's seen a little bit of a pick-up in the very top end ... but for us, we'd be looking at all three price ranges to be showing an improvement before you could call that the industry was on the way up," he said.

Brisbane Times