Prospects for Adelaide’s Property Market in 2025 - February 2025

By Guest Blogger, Terry Ryder, founder,

hotspotting.com.au and propertyU

I have to confess I’ve been an Adelaide fan for a long time. Long before investors started to realise that Adelaide’s market had a lot to offer, I recommend it to clients. I saw it as the nation’s most under-rated capital city market and argued that it did not deserve its outdated reputation as a low-growth city.

Our research had noted that South Australia was rising up the rankings of state and territory economies, Adelaide offered comparative affordability and the Adelaide property market was responding with rising sales activity, increasing prices, very low vacancy rates and rising rents. All of that was underpinned by a city with great amenity and lifestyle, including beaches, wine districts and an appealing hills precinct.

Today, Adelaide is high on the bucket lists of many investors. It has stood out in recent years for its remarkable consistency of performance, both with prices and rents. In 2024 Adelaide was a major challenger to Perth on house price growth. Its median prices rose 12.4% for houses and 12.2% for units, according to PropTrack data. Meanwhile, vacancy rates remain well below 1%, which continues to put upward pressure on rents.

Recently, I completed an analysis of the nation’s 14 major market jurisdictions - 8 capital cities and 6 state regional markets, using various metrics to rank them on their prospects for price growth in 2025. Adelaide ranked third out of 14, well ahead to Sydney, Melbourne or Perth, with only Brisbane ranked (marginally) higher among the capital cities.

This speaks to Adelaide’s consistency of performance. The price graph for any Adelaide suburb shows steady prices increases over the past five years, with some locations doubling in value. And yet it continues to deliver growth, showing no signs yet to slowing down, in contrast to the Perth market.

In my experience, a market typically will have a growth spurt that lasts perhaps three years, and then the market will pause for a year or two, before resuming its upward path. But Adelaide has consistently delivered growth for the past five years and continues to advance.

In that recent analysis of the nation’s major markets to determine prospects for 2025, Adelaide scored highly on all the metrics used to arrive at the overall rankings, including infrastructure spending. That latter factor is important: spending on major new infrastructure is a major generator of economic activity and jobs, and from that comes strong demand for real estate. Adelaide, on a per capita basis, has one of the nation’s biggest infrastructure spends – in that recent analysis conducted by Hotspotting, Adelaide ranked third out of the nation’s 14 major market jurisdictions on infrastructure investment per capita, headed by the massive program of building vessels for the Navy.

There’s a key reason why Adelaide continues to perform so well: it continues to be one of the nation’s leading growth economies. In the quarterly editions of The State of the States report published by CommSec (a branch of Commonwealth Bank), South Australia has consistently ranked first or second nationally, above the big eastern states, for the past two years. In the January 2025 edition, South Australia ranked second behind Western Australia.

That strong economy, and the infrastructure spend, has generated jobs and a rising population. At the same time, listings of homes for sales have been low. Those factors combined are a formula for rising prices. While nationwide listings of homes for sale are now 10% higher than a year ago (according to SQM Research), Adelaide remains 1.4% lower.

Despite strong price growth in recent years, demand remains strong for affordable suburbs in Adelaide’s north, where houses are still available in the $400,000s. And its median prices ($850,000 and $590,000) continue to present attractive value-for-month relative to the three biggest cities.

Adelaide also offers an array of quality middle-ring suburbs where houses typically cost well under $1 million, including in the LGAs of Marion, West Torrens, Port Adelaide-Enfield and Tea Tree Gully.

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