Everybody loves a deal. When it comes to property, it is no different. We track every Brisbane price cut and publish the sharpest ones weekly, so anyone can watch them live. Over the last two months there have been plenty of listings slashing prices, 65 of them cut by 10% or more. The more I sit with the records though, the more I notice another camp of sellers doing absolutely nothing. Their listings just sit there.
As of Monday morning, 10 August 2026, there were about 5,107 established houses and townhouses on the market across greater Brisbane. The data spans postcodes 4000 to 4199, with listings marked as 'under contract' taken out. Of those, 484 have expressed their motivation to move by cutting their advertised price at least once in their campaign. And this is not even one in ten.
Based on our data, that 1,061 figure quoted above are the persistent ones. Their advertisements have been sitting for more than 60 days without a single price move, which puts the no-movers at about 1 in 5 of everything on the market right now. That's more than two sitters for every cutter.
Quick disclaimer: I do own property here too, and I would classify myself as a member of the 'can-wait' camp. So please do not take this writing as an opinionated one where I have a go at stubborn vendors... The idea of this piece is to give everyone a feel of current market behaviour which you can't easily spot by browsing individual listings.
Sixty days of nothing
As the disclaimer above says, this camp includes me. I'm calling us the silent sitters, and by definition it is a house or townhouse advertised for 60 days or more on the same listing (campaign). Never relisted, just sitting there. We also don't drop our price, not a single dollar, not even an attempt. Zero. For measuring this camp I start the 'listing clock' on day 1 when we first encounter the ad, and nothing resets it. Once a home sells or leaves the market, it drops out of the count and doesn't get classified as a sitter anymore.
As of this morning there are 1,061 of them. 241 have gone past 90 days. The top 2 record holders are at 108 days each and counting, both in the Redcliffe area, same ad the whole time, nothing changed. Thus far, the median age for a sitter is day 76 and counting.
Let's dive 1 step deeper, and surprisingly it gets more interesting. So with 1,061 listings, only 469 still show numbers in their asking price. Most of the remaining ones have refused to name it from day one, just 'offers invited' or 'contact agent', no changes at all. And 158 did something sneaky: had a price tag all the way until enough is enough, then the dollar figure quietly came OFF the ad and got replaced with words. This is the Silent Cut, and they have their own dedicated section in my earlier price cuts piece. Lastly, the plot twist: 21 have raised their price. In this market.
Which leaves 884 homes, five months into a falling market, that have done nothing whatsoever. No cut, no wording change, no relist. Frozen.
The public portals won't tell you any of this, and they are not obligated to. A listing sitting 90 days looks identical to one that went up last Tuesday, no tag, no special description, no counter you can trust. Anyway, 90 days of silence is still the market speaking, and buyers just never get to hear it.
Where the sitters are
Here is where the strictest group sits, the 884 that have never cut, never hidden their number and never relisted. Suburbs with at least 40 houses and townhouses advertised this morning.
| Suburb | Sitting 60+ days | Listings advertised | Share of listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Victoria Point 4165 | 18 | 94 | 19.1% |
| Richlands 4077 | 16 | 56 | 28.6% |
| Calamvale 4116 | 15 | 73 | 20.5% |
| Forest Lake 4078 | 14 | 78 | 17.9% |
| Greenbank 4124 | 14 | 99 | 14.1% |
| Margate 4019 | 13 | 49 | 26.5% |
| Logan Reserve 4133 | 13 | 90 | 14.4% |
| Pallara 4110 | 12 | 46 | 26.1% |
| Kippa-Ring 4021 | 12 | 51 | 23.5% |
| Newport 4020 | 12 | 53 | 22.6% |
| Inala 4077 | 11 | 40 | 27.5% |
| Paddington 4064 | 11 | 42 | 26.2% |
| Redcliffe 4020 | 11 | 60 | 18.3% |
| Woodridge 4114 | 11 | 70 | 15.7% |
To date, Victoria Point is leading on the raw count, this fits everything else we know about the bayside. But look north, Margate, Kippa-Ring, Newport and Redcliffe are 4 neighbouring suburbs on the peninsula with 48 sitters between them. Including both of the 108-day record holders. This area is not cutting, we are just waiting it out.
For the sharpest single number on the board, we have Richlands. 16 of the 56 listed homes are frozen, that is 28.6% (more than a quarter). Then Inala next door runs 27.5%, and before someone concludes this is just an outer suburb phenomenon, Paddington is 11 of 42 sitting. So that is one of Brisbane's most fashionable inner suburbs with a quarter of its ads not moving in two months.
Greenbank reads milder than expected here at 14, and that is something worth digging into. Greenbank vendors have not stopped holding their ground, they just favour taking the price off the ad entirely instead of cutting it. And that is exactly the move this table's strict rules throw out. Count Greenbank on the loose rule instead, 60 days with no cut of any kind, and it jumps to 26, top of the board. Its neighbour New Beith I left out of the table completely: 13 of its 31 advertised homes are frozen, the highest share anywhere, but I won't pitch a story on 31 ads.
The dearer the home, the deeper the freeze
My initial guess was that the entry level sitters would grip the hardest and not let off a single dollar, but looks like the record is suggesting the opposite.
For the 1,061 sitters within the cohort, 469 still showing a genuine number ask a median of $1.2m flat. And the top quarter starts at $1.6m. The 484 cutters centre a full $200k lower, median asking is $999k after their cuts. The freeze definitely skews up-market.
The table below widens back out to every priced ad on the market, all 2,314 of them, and asks two questions of each price band: what share has cut this campaign, and what share is sitting 60 days plus untouched.
| Asking price band | Priced ads | Cut this campaign | Sitting 60+ days, no change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $750k | 253 | 25.7% | 5.9% |
| $750k to $1m | 736 | 24.7% | 12.8% |
| $1m to $1.5m | 865 | 20.0% | 12.6% |
| Over $1.5m | 460 | 13.9% | 18.5% |
Read it as a gradient. Under $750,000, a quarter of vendors have already cut and barely one in twenty is frozen. Over $1.5m it flips, the cut rate nearly halves and the freeze rate triples. The cheaper the home, the faster its vendor deals with the market they're actually in.
Unfortunately the dataset can't tell who owns these homes, so the why is inference and not a measurement. But the shape fits a simple story, that is: the cheaper end is where mortgages do the deciding, and the more expensive end is where equity buys you the luxury of not having to blink. Holding out is expensive, an empty million-dollar home costs its owner real money every week in interest and rates alone. The people doing it longest are the people who can.
The clock you're reading is wrong anyway
Days on market is the single most useful number a buyer can carry into a negotiation. A vendor at day four is not bothered about it, but fast forward to day 90 and a different conversation opens up. It doesn't matter what the ad says anymore at that stage, the indication for negotiation is there. And that is exactly why it's the number the market is worst at telling you.
The portals count restarts every time a home is relisted. Mine doesn't, because I keep the dead ads. Right now there are 165 greater Brisbane houses and townhouses advertised that already failed an earlier campaign this year. Their current ads read a median of 26 days old. Measured from the day they FIRST tried to sell, the median is 68 days. The full mechanics of that clock trick, and the questions that beat it at an open home, are in the price cuts piece.
So the 1,061 in this post are a floor in two separate ways. I only count from the day I first saw each ad, and I only count unbroken campaigns. The real amount of waiting in this market is larger than any number I can print.
The ad tells you the ask and nothing else. Flood, easements, what's been approved next door, what the block has done before. Check any Queensland address, free and no signup:
The third door
Not every stalled campaign ends in a cut or a sale. In the week from 3 to 9 August (a complete Monday to Sunday week), 64 Greater Brisbane listings left the market with no sale on the record and no sign of coming back. All property types on this count, not just houses. The weekly Radar issue slices a different seven days off the same record, so the two won't read identical. Some of those did sell and the sold data just hasn't caught up, it can lag by a month or three. The rest gave up for now, and a share of them will be back in spring with a fresh ad and a clock reading day one. We hold onto every one of them on the off-market record, free to read.
What I'll watch from here
One snapshot can't tell you where this ends, but the ratio can teach you about the current market behaviour. Today it stands at more than two sitters for every cutter. If spring brings the buyers back, the sitters get what they want and the record will head the opposite direction. If it doesn't, one of the camps must give in. So the ratio will move according to whether the cutting turns more aggressive or the exits spike because they walk instead. Either way the standoff resolves in the data before it resolves in the headlines.
I'm publishing the same count, same rules, every week. So, watch it with me.
And if you're buying this spring, one warning from the other side of this data: a long campaign is not an automatic discount. Plenty of these vendors are frozen by choice, not by circumstance, and the frozen-by-choice ones simply won't sell short of their number. Days on market tells you who to ask, not what you'll get. So ask both questions at the open home. How long has this really been for sale, and why is the vendor selling. When the first answer is long and the second has a deadline in it, that's where the negotiating room lives. Then go digging on the address itself.
How I counted this
The definitions carry this post, so here they are straight.
- "Brisbane" means postcodes 4000 to 4199: the council area plus Logan, the Redlands and the southern Redcliffe peninsula.
- Everything live is as at Monday morning, 10 August 2026, after the overnight reconcile. Anything counted over a period runs on complete Monday to Sunday weeks, and the last one closed 9 August 2026.
- Houses and townhouses only, matched on exact type. Units, land and acreage are out. So is project stock: house-and-land packages, staged releases, lot addresses, anything advertised "From $X". So are homes already under contract.
- A cutter has at least one recorded drop in its advertised price this campaign. Drops deeper than 22 percent are treated as bad price parses and thrown out, and listings with three or more recorded drops are thrown out as hidden-price ad flicker rather than a vendor deciding things. Those two guards removed 29 listings from the cutter count.
- A silent sitter has been advertised 60+ days on the same campaign, counted from the day I first saw it, with no recorded drop. The strict subset (884 homes, and the suburb table) also has no price rise, no dollar-to-wording swap and no earlier campaign on record. Two homes both hid their number and raised it at some point, so the subgroups overlap by two.
- A "priced" ad shows a genuine dollar figure. Figures under $50,000 are treated as parse junk, they are mostly rent numbers leaking into the wrong field, and a couple are million-dollar asks with mangled formatting.
- Every days-on-market figure is a floor. My record starts in late April 2026 and daily watching starts in June, so campaigns older than the record look younger than they are, and reset clocks older than the record are invisible.
- A quiet exit is a delisting with no sale and no relist recorded, where the ad's own wording doesn't say sold or under contract. Sold data lags one to three months, so treat exit counts as provisional.
Companion reads: price cuts aren't working in Brisbane covers the four moves vendors make when the price fails, and the weekly cut list lives on the Deal Radar page, free, updated every Friday. Suburb by suburb, the same record feeds each suburb page.
FAQ
What does days on market actually mean?
Days on market is how long a property has been advertised for sale. The catch is that the portals count the current AD, not the campaign: withdraw a listing, put it back up a week later, and the counter restarts at zero. As at 10 August 2026 there were 165 greater Brisbane houses and townhouses advertised whose earlier campaign this year already failed. Their current ads read a median of 26 days old, but measured from their first campaign they had really been trying to sell for a median of 68 days. Any published average days on market figure inherits the same flaw, because it's averaging ad clocks, resets and all. So treat a low days-on-market figure as a claim, not a fact, and ask when the home FIRST came to market.
Isn't a slow winter market normal for Brisbane?
Partly, yes. Winter is the quiet season and some of what this post measures will be seasonal. The honest answer is that my record only goes back to late April 2026, so I can't yet tell you whether 1,061 sitters is a normal Brisbane winter or a strange one, and neither can anyone else, because nobody publishes this count at all. What I can do is count the same thing the same way every week and publish it, so by next winter there is a real baseline. Until then, read the ratio rather than the level: more than two sitters for every cutter, heading into the spring selling season, is the number to watch.
What about houses under $350,000?
That bracket has essentially left greater Brisbane. Of the 2,314 houses and townhouses advertised with a genuine dollar figure as at 10 August 2026, fewer than ten asked under $350,000, and nearly all of those are on the bay islands. The genuine entry-level house market now lives in regional Queensland, and it is not immune from cutting either: in the first week of August a Moranbah house came down from $375,000 to $349,000 and a Mount Isa house from $369,000 to $345,000. Cheaper stock cuts. It is the dear end that freezes.
Why don't agents just talk their vendors into cutting?
The incentive is there. An agent only gets paid when the home sells, and an overpriced listing costs them advertising, weekends and reputation. But an agent cannot force a vendor who can afford to wait, and this winter's sitters are concentrated exactly where waiting is affordable: the sitters' median ask is $1.2 million against the cutters' $999,000. The market has persuaded 484 vendors to move so far. The other 1,061 are not budging, and most of them don't have to.