The price gap between houses and units is tipped to close further as lack of stock drives up prices.

Before the pandemic, the Australian median house price was 11.5% higher than the median unit price.

During the pandemic, the rush of buyers to larger lifestyle properties pushed that gap even further apart to 29.5%.

Now with shortages in both houses and units, PropTrack economist Anne Flaherty tips the gap will close substantially in the coming years and has already started in some markets.

“There’s a lot of factors that support growing demand for apartments. But at the same time, our development pipeline is starting to slow particularly for apartments – so you know that would imply we’re going to see that gap start to close over the coming year or so,” she says.

“So, what we’re going to see is those apartment prices which didn’t show that much movement in a lot of markets for quite a long time, are going to start to increase.”