When a Brisbane ad hides its price, 1 in 4 come back with a lower price within 2 months

Everybody has watched an ad they liked go quiet. One week it says Offers over $1,195,000, the next week it says Submit all offers, and the number is just gone. The usual guess is one of two things. Either the seller is about to drop, or someone has made an offer.

Back in August I counted how often a Brisbane ad hides its price and doesnt put it back, in more than half of Brisbane ads wont tell you the price. I left it there. This time I followed those ads to see what they did next. All numbers are the Brisbane City Council area, every property type, 7 July to 11 October 2026, counted on 17 October 2026.

• 302 of the 1,948 price cuts I could follow came after the ad hid its price first and put words in its place. 15.5%, a bit more than 1 in 7.
• Those cuts were bigger. A typical cut was 5.4% ($60,000), against 4.0% ($46,000) for ads that cut the price without hiding it. By typical I mean the middle one, half were bigger and half smaller. About half of that gap comes from the price being hidden for longer.
• Of the ones that came back lower within 60 days, the typical wait between the price disappearing and the lower price going up was about 3 weeks (21 days).
• Of the ads that hid their price between 7 July and 12 August, 24% came back with a lower price within 60 days. 20% found a buyer or sold first.

15.5% of Brisbane price cuts started with the ad hiding its price

Here is one I track, a unit, wording exactly as the ad had it. It went up as "Offers Over $899k", then "Ground Floor Gem - Offers Over $899k", then "Price Reduced - Offers Over $885k". On 10 August the number disappeared and it said "Motivated Seller! Offers considered". 46 days later, on 25 September, it came back as "Price Dropped!! $865k +". As of 12 October it says "Offers in the Mid $800s".

So the ad hid the price, then came back lower. That is the cycle. Based on our data, 302 of 1,948 Brisbane City cuts in the 14 weeks went this way (15.5%). The other 1,646 cut the price without hiding it, from one price to a lower one with no words in between.

I was strict on purpose. The words had to stay in the ad for at least 1 day, and I left out another 42 cuts that went via an auction, a sale that fell through, or a step I couldnt read, plus 6 where the words were up for less than a day. Some ads just say For Sale or Awaiting price guide where the price was, which can be the stock wording an ad shows when no price is filled in, not the seller deciding anything. Leave those out too and it is 215 of 1,861, still about 1 in 9.

Houses and townhouses do it more than units, 18.4% of their cuts (225 of 1,225) against 10.9% for units and apartments (76 of 699).

The usual steps: Offers over, then Submit all offers, then a lower Offers over

Most of these ads go the same way. A dollar figure, then words, then a lower dollar figure. What changes is the words in the middle. Here is how often each kind of words showed up (a cut counts once for each kind it used):

• An offers line with no number (Submit all offers, All offers considered, Inviting offers): 114 cuts. The most common path of all is Offers over $X, then one of these, then a lower Offers over, 68 times.
• Just For Sale: 85.
• A selling line instead of a price (New to market!, Must be sold, a line about the house): 71.
• By negotiation: 28.
• Contact agent: 22.
• Awaiting price guide: 19.
• Expressions of interest: 4.

241 of the 302 used one set of words before the lower number came back. The other 61 changed the words 2 or more times, like Make an Offer! then BEST OFFERS BY 2ND OF SEPTEMBER 5PM then $2.29M+.

Of the ones that came back lower, it took about 3 weeks, and the cut was bigger

Take the ads that hid their price between 7 July and 12 August and came back with a lower price within 60 days, 110 of them. From the day the price disappeared to the day the lower price went up, the typical wait was 21 days, about 3 weeks. Half of them came back somewhere between 9 and 35 days.

How long the old price was up before anything happened is about the same either way, 14 days before the price was hidden against 15 days before a cut that didnt hide it.

And the cut is bigger when it lands, at every price level. About half of that comes from the price being hidden for longer. Hidden under 2 weeks, a typical cut was 4.6%. Hidden 2 weeks or more, 6.7%. Cut without hiding, 4.0%. Here it is by the price before the cut.

Under $750,000 it is rare, 8.4% of cuts. From $1m up it is about 1 in 5. So it happens a lot more on dearer homes. A seller at $1.3m who needs to come down $70,000 seems a lot more likely to hide the price first than one at $650,000 taking off $25,000.

Once an ad hides its price, 1 in 4 come back lower within 60 days

Now flip it around, which is the question a buyer actually has. You are watching an ad, the price just disappeared. What happens next?

I took every Brisbane City ad that swapped a dollar figure for words between 7 July and 12 August 2026, 454 of them, once each, and followed them for 60 days.

So 110 of 454 came back with a lower price within 60 days (24%). A typical cut on those was 6.6%, $70,500. And when a number did come back, it was usually lower. 110 lower against 46 at the same price or higher, about 7 in 10.

But look at the other side. 90 (20%) found a buyer (the ad said under contract) or had a recorded sale before any lower price showed up, and another 43 had the ad taken down with no sale recorded yet. A third (32%) still had no price after 60 days.

Honestly, a hidden price is not a strong sign on its own

I wanted this to be a clean buyer rule, like wait 3 weeks after the price disappears and you get 5% off. The data doesnt back that.

I compared these ads with ads the same age that never hid their price at all. Ads 30 to 59 days old that never hid it showed a lower one within 60 days 23% of the time (I checked every ad each Monday, 1,155 checks at that age). The ones that hid their price at that age, 21% (35 of 164 times, across 162 ads). Under 30 days old it was 42% against 29%. So an ad that hides its price is no more likely to come down than one that never does. If anything a bit less.

What a hidden price does tell you is that the old price is now the most they are asking. When it comes back it is usually lower, and when the cut comes it is bigger than a normal cut. It doesnt tell you that waiting is safe. 1 in 5 found a buyer first.

Note that: I can only see what the ad says. If one of these sold for less than its old price, that is a cut too, my data just cant see it until the sale is recorded.

Is it getting more common?

If you just count it up, it looks like it. 10.2% of cuts in July went this way and 19.4% in September. But that is mostly my own record. I only started keeping the ad wording on 4 July, so for a July cut I had less history to see the price being hidden.

To be fair to July, I counted again only looking at the 45 days before each cut. Then it is 14.7% from 21 to 31 August, 16.3% in September and 16.3% from 1 to 11 October. A small rise at most. Too early to call it a trend, I will count it again in a couple of months.

No one suburb or real estate office does most of it

157 different real estate offices did it at least once, out of 403 that cut any price. The 10 that did it most only account for 23% of these cuts. So it isnt a few offices with their own habit, it is spread right across the market.

By suburb, the highest share I could see was Carina, 11 of its 30 cuts, and Bracken Ridge had 10 of 49. Small numbers, 1 cut moves Carina by 3 points, so I wouldnt read much into the order. For the offices that cut the most overall, see Brisbane offices that cut more than half their prices.

If you are watching an ad that just hid its price

• Write down the last price it showed. That is now the most they are asking, and the agent knows you know it.
• Ask the agent what price will not buy it, and why the owner is selling. Both tell you more than the words in the ad.
• If you want it, dont just wait. 1 in 5 of these found a buyer inside 60 days, before any lower price showed up.
• A lower number when it comes back is not a bargain by itself. Check what similar homes nearby actually sold for.
• If it comes back lower, a typical cut in my count was 5 to 7%. Not 20.

For what happens to cuts that dont work, see price cuts arent working in Brisbane, and for how many homes cut each month by council area, see 1 in 5 Ipswich homes cut their price in September.

How I counted

• Brisbane City Council area, matched from the suburb within postcodes 4000 to 4599, same as my September count. Every property type I track, houses, townhouses, units and land, with builder and house-and-land ads left out.
• I read the price from the words in the ad itself. When an ad hides its price, the old number can still be stored in the background, so I only count a dollar figure the ad actually shows. Since 3 September, my reading of the price matched our usual price reading 99.9% of the time, across 12,678 price changes where both could read one.
• A cut means the ad showed a lower dollar figure than the last one it showed. Cuts over 22% are left out (mostly price misreads and odd jumps), and so are cuts that went back to the old price or higher inside 14 days, and ads with 3 or more cuts in a week.
• Hid the price first means every step between the 2 dollar figures was words with no price, and the words stayed up for at least 1 day.
• A typical number is the middle one: half were bigger, half smaller.
• Cuts are dated by when I first saw them, 7 July to 11 October 2026, Brisbane time. I started saving the ad wording on 4 July and the first 3 days were catch-up, so I start at 7 July. On 12 October I started reading more ads, so I stopped the day before to keep it the same set of ads all the way through. There were some days I didnt read every ad, so a short spell with the price hidden could be missed, which means the 15.5% is if anything low.
• Where 2 ads take turns on the same home within a few hours, or my system read an ad again that hadnt changed, those changes are left out, same as on every other count on the site.
• For the 30 and 60 day follow-up, whatever happened first counts. Found a buyer comes from the words in the ad (under contract, under offer). Sold and taken down come from our sales record, which takes weeks to fill in.

Questions people ask

What does it mean when the price or price guide is removed from a listing?

It can mean a few things, and the ad wont tell you which. In the Brisbane City Council area, of the ads that hid their price between 7 July and 12 August 2026, 24% came back with a lower price within 60 days, 10% came back at the same price or higher, 20% found a buyer or sold first, and 32% still had no price.

Does Submit all offers mean the price has dropped?

Not by itself. It means the seller wants to see what turns up. But in Brisbane between 7 July and 11 October 2026, 302 of 1,948 price cuts (15.5%) came after the ad swapped its price for words like these, and a typical cut was 5.4%.

How long after the price is hidden does it drop?

Of the Brisbane ads that came back lower within 60 days, the typical wait was 21 days (about 3 weeks), and half came back between 9 and 35 days.

Should I wait for the price to drop?

That is your call, but know the odds. Within 60 days about 1 in 4 came back with a lower price and about 1 in 5 found a buyer first. Ads that never hid their price came down at least as often.