Market Update - July #2
Properties Are Sitting for 33 Days. Here Is Why Smart Lower North Shore Buyers Move Before Spring, Not During It.
Sydney properties are now taking an average of 33 days to sell – six days longer than the combined capital cities average of 27. Winter listings typically transact at around a 1% discount to spring results. And every one of Sydney’s Big Four banks agrees the next major wave of buyer competition arrives with the spring selling season in October and November. Put those three facts together and the picture for the Lower North Shore is unambiguous: the next six to eight weeks are a genuine window, and it closes the moment the jacarandas bloom.
WHY 33 DAYS MATTERS MORE THAN IT SOUNDS
Thirty-three days doesn’t sound like a dramatic number, and on its own it isn’t. But it is Sydney’s longest average selling window relative to the other capitals, and it has held steady even as the rest of the market has slowed. What it tells buyers is simple: vendors currently on market are not selling in the first week to the first bidder through the door. They are running full campaigns, taking genuine feedback across several weekends, and in a meaningful number of cases, adjusting their expectations somewhere in that 33-day stretch.
For a buyer, that extended window is not a warning sign. It is room to move. A buyer who is finance-ready, who has done the comparable-sales work, and who is prepared to engage early in a campaign – rather than waiting for a price reduction to become public – is negotiating with a vendor who still has weeks of uncertainty ahead of them. That is a fundamentally different conversation to the one that happens in spring, when the same property might field three genuine offers in its first ten days on market.
“Thirty-three days on market isn’t a market that’s stuck – it’s a market that’s honest. Vendors are getting real feedback in real time, and the buyers who read that feedback alongside them, rather than waiting for a headline price cut, are the ones getting the outcome. That’s true in Mosman as much as it is in Neutral Bay.”
GERARD MAZAR
Director, Mazar Martin Buyers Advisory
THE SPRING RESET IS COMING – AND IT CHANGES EVERYTHING
Every property cycle in Sydney follows a recognisable seasonal rhythm, and 2026 has not broken that pattern. Listing volumes build through August and September and peak in October and November, when better weather, spring gardens, and the pre-Christmas moving deadline pull the largest pool of buyers of the year back into the market simultaneously. That is also, historically, when auction clearance rates recover most sharply from their winter lows.
The mechanics matter here. It is not that spring vendors get smarter or spring properties get better. It is that spring buyer competition returns as a bloc, all at once, and the negotiating room that exists right now – across a winter market with 33-day selling windows and a sub-50% clearance rate – closes accordingly. A buyer weighing up a Cammeray townhouse or a Lane Cove family home in late July is negotiating against a thinner field of competitors than the same buyer will face for the same property type in October.
This is precisely the dynamic the Lower North Shore’s owner-occupier base tends to underestimate. Buyers reason, understandably, that a bigger spring market means more choice. It does – but it also means every one of those choices is being fought over by more people, with less time for a vendor to sit with an offer before a second and third arrive behind it. The properties that come to market between now and the end of August are being shown to a genuinely smaller buyer pool, and that arithmetic favours whoever is in the room.
“We tell clients the same thing every winter: don’t wait for spring thinking there’ll be more to choose from and it’ll be easier. There will be more to choose from, and it will be harder – because everyone else waited too. The buyers who transact in July and August are negotiating in a market that hasn’t remembered it’s supposed to be competitive yet.”
JEREMY MARTIN
Director, Mazar Martin Buyers Advisory – Buyers Agents, Lower North Shore
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WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE ON THE GROUND ACROSS THE LOWER NORTH SHORE
In the $2-4 million family home bracket across Neutral Bay, Cammeray and Lane Cove, the 33-day window is where genuine negotiation happens – vendors here are typically upgrading or relocating on their own timeline and are receptive to a clean, well-structured offer well before a campaign’s natural end. At the Mosman and Cremorne prestige end, the extended selling period tends to reflect a smaller, more considered buyer pool rather than a lack of underlying demand – which is exactly the environment in which a properly represented buyer can secure terms that would not survive a spring auction with six registered bidders.
None of this is a reason to rush a purchase that isn’t right. It is a reason to treat the next six to eight weeks as what they are: the part of the calendar where the Lower North Shore’s structural scarcity and this winter’s softer conditions overlap most usefully for a prepared buyer. That overlap does not last through spring.
Gerard Mazar
DIRECTOR · MAZAR MARTIN BUYERS ADVISORY
Gerard is a specialist buyers agent on Sydney’s Lower North Shore with deep expertise across Mosman, Neutral Bay, Cremorne, and the wider harbourside market including suburbs surrounding Willoughby to Chatswood. His buyers advisory work is built on long-standing agent relationships and intimate knowledge of the LNS micro-markets.
Jeremy Martin
DIRECTOR · MAZAR MARTIN BUYERS ADVISORY
Jeremy is a specialist buyers agent on Sydney’s Lower North Shore with deep expertise across Mosman to Cremorne, but also Lane Cove, Cammeray, Crows Nest. His buyers advisory work is built on rigorous daily market intelligence, long-standing agent relationships, and an instinct for identifying motivated sellers and off-market opportunities before they reach the public market.
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