One in Ten Listings Cut Its Asking Price This Month. Here Is Where.

Where asking prices are being cut

A settled median tells you what buyers paid last quarter. An asking-price cut tells you what sellers are prepared to accept this week. Shorted's price-drops board watches the second signal across a panel of 500 suburbs, and as at 24 September 2026 it says this:

	Listings tracked	Cut price in 30 days	Share	Median cut
National panel	15,835	1,661	10.5%	4.3%
Victoria	9,036	1,126	12.5%	4.4%
Queensland	3,439	316	9.2%	4.5%
New South Wales	3,360	219	6.5%	3.8%

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• 10.5%

  of listings cut their price

• 4.3%

  median cut

  average 5.3%

• $110M

  asking price removed

The average cut is larger than the median, 5.3 per cent against 4.3, because a minority of vendors take a big haircut. The reductions add up to $109.9 million of asking price removed in a month, from a median asking price of $895,000. Both the Victoria-heavy panel and the median-versus-average gap are important caveats, and they are dealt with below.

How this is measured

The panel is built from public listings on the two big portals, deduplicated by address so a home advertised on both counts once. A "cut" is a physical address whose advertised price fell within a rolling 30-day window. Three rules keep the number honest:

• Auction and price-on-application listings are excluded from the priced counts, because they have no asking price to cut. Of the 15,835 active listings, 11,548 carry a numeric price.
• Cuts above 40 per cent are discarded as listing typos. A $1.2 million home relisted at $120,000 is a missing zero, not a signal.
• A suburb only appears once it has at least three discounted addresses. Below that floor a suburb row would identify individual homes, so it is withheld.

Nothing here is a raw listing. Addresses, agents and individual prices stay in the database; only the aggregates are published. That is a licensing posture, not a technical limit, and the full method is on the methodology page.

Victoria is discounting hardest

One in eight Victorian listings cut its price in the past month, roughly double the New South Wales rate. It is consistent with the ABS picture, where Victoria was the only state whose mean dwelling price fell in the March quarter and Melbourne units dropped 8 per cent. The state-by-state guide has those numbers.

The suburbs with the highest share of discounted listings, of those with enough listings to say anything:

Suburb	Active listings	Cut price	Share	Median cut
Fawkner, VIC	64	19	29.7%	6.3%
Frankston South, VIC	74	20	27.0%	6.0%
Manor Lakes, VIC	122	31	25.4%	3.5%
Altona North, VIC	125	30	24.0%	4.3%
Seaford, VIC	74	17	23.0%	6.2%
Narre Warren South, VIC	74	17	23.0%	5.1%
Burpengary, QLD	141	32	22.7%	3.5%
Altona Meadows, VIC	83	17	20.5%	5.0%
Croydon, VIC	147	28	19.0%	4.9%
Brisbane City, QLD	121	23	19.0%	4.0%

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1. Fawkner[====================]29.7%
2. Frankston South[==================--]27.0%
3. Manor Lakes[=================---]25.4%
4. Altona North[================----]24.0%
5. Seaford[===============-----]23.0%
6. Narre Warren South[===============-----]23.0%
7. Burpengary[===============-----]22.7%
8. Altona Meadows[==============------]20.5%

Two patterns. The first is geography: Fawkner, Altona North and Altona Meadows sit in Melbourne's inner north and west, while Manor Lakes, Narre Warren South, Cranbourne and Officer are the growth corridors where new estates meet second-hand stock. The second is price point. The deepest median cuts are not in the cheapest suburbs. Mount Martha, with a median asking price of $1.5 million, has 27 discounted listings at a median cut of 6.0 per cent, and Mount Eliza, at $2.1 million, is cutting 5.5 per cent. Vendors at the top of the Mornington Peninsula are adjusting expectations by more than vendors in Manor Lakes, whose 3.5 per cent median cut is closer to a rounding-down than a repricing.

By raw count rather than share, the busiest suburbs are Burpengary (32 cuts), Manor Lakes (31), Altona North (30), Croydon (28) and Mount Martha (27).

The trend since August

Shorted has published a daily drop index since 13 August 2026. On that day 4.0 per cent of active addresses in the panel had cut their price in the trailing window. By the first week of September the rate had passed 9 per cent, it peaked at 10.3 per cent, and on 23 September it stood at 8.1 per cent.

Read that rise carefully. Part of it is real: spring listings arrived, stock rose from roughly 71,000 to over 80,000 tracked addresses in mid-August, and more stock means more competition and more cuts. Part of it is measurement: the number of suburbs swept in any given fortnight varies with the crawl schedule, from 495 in August to between 95 and 200 in September, and a smaller panel is a noisier one. The 30-day overview at the top of this piece is the figure to quote; the daily index is the figure to watch for direction.

What a price cut is not

A cut is not a sale. Of the 7,064 sold results the crawl happened to capture, the median sold price was $961,875, above the median asking price of $895,000, because sold captures skew toward the suburbs and price bands the crawl visits most often. Treat sold figures on the board as indicative only.

A cut is also not a fall in value. A vendor who listed 8 per cent above the suburb's median and trimmed 4 per cent is still asking above the median. The useful comparison is the suburb page's Valuer-General median, where one exists, against its current median asking price. Altona North, for instance, settled at a median of $960,000 in the December 2025 quarter and is currently asking a median of $890,000, with 24 per cent of listings already discounted. That is a suburb where the asking side has moved below the settled side, which is rare and worth knowing if you are buying there.

Using this

The price-drops board ranks states, suburbs and agencies and refreshes after every crawl. Each suburb page carries its own recent cuts alongside the official median, the Census profile and the SEIFA and hazard layers, so the discount can be read in context rather than as a headline. The board is filterable by state and links every suburb row to its profile.

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Method and sources: Shorted listings panel of 500 suburbs, deduplicated across portals, 30-day rolling window to 24 September 2026; suburb rows require at least three discounted addresses; cuts above 40 per cent excluded. Settled medians from state Valuer-General open data (CC BY 4.0). Listing-derived figures are aggregates and are never republished as individual listings. This is descriptive data, not advice.