CANBERRA, July 26 (Xinhua) -- Property prices in Australia have fallen over the past 12 months for the first time in six years, a report has revealed.
The national median property price fell one percent in the 12 months to the end of June 2018, according to a report published by property group Domain on Thursday, the first time prices have fallen in a 12-month period since June 2012.
It comes on the back of falling prices in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two biggest and most expensive cities.
House prices in Sydney fell 4.5 percent in the last year, the largest annual drop since 2008, while in Melbourne they dropped two percent in the second quarter of 2018 alone, the biggest drop in a single quarter since 2012.
The single worst-performing region was Melbourne's inner-east, the city's most expensive area, where the median house price dropped 8.4 percent, or 131,000 Australian dollars, in a single year.
"The Melbourne market is retracting," Nicola Powell, chief data scientist for the Domain Group, said on Thursday.
"The annual rates of growth are the slowest since 2012."
In some areas of Sydney the median price dropped more than 10 percent in a year, while the median apartment price dropped 3.5 percent, the sharpest annual decline since 2006.
"Sydney hasn't experienced this level of fall for a decade," Powell said.
"It's a stark difference to what was occurring even just a year ago, when we had annual double-digit growth for both houses and apartments.
"House and unit prices are now back to values seen at the end of 2016."
Powell cited tighter credit availability as a result of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority imposing tighter lending conditions on the major banks as a key reason for the decline.
"With more choice and less urgency, there are fewer active buyers in the market, and those who are in the market are being restricted by tightening lending standards and the availability of credit," she told the Guardian Australia.
