Median Price
The middle price point when all property sales in a suburb or city are ranked from lowest to highest. Half sold for more, half for less.
Plain-English definition. The median price is the middle value in a sorted list of property sales — half the sales are below it, half above. It's the standard headline measure for Australian property prices because it's less skewed by extreme outliers than the mean (average).
How it works in Australia. Major data providers (CoreLogic, Domain, PropTrack, SQM Research) publish suburb-, city- and state-level medians monthly. The ABS produces the official quarterly Residential Property Price Indexes but uses a stratified hedonic methodology rather than raw medians. CoreLogic's Home Value Index uses a hedonic model to control for compositional change. Pure medians can be misleading at the suburb level when sales volumes are low — a single luxury sale can lift a quiet suburb's monthly median by 20% and reverse next month.
Concrete example. In Carlton (Melbourne) ten houses sell in a month at: $1.0m, $1.1m, $1.15m, $1.2m, $1.3m, $1.35m, $1.4m, $1.6m, $1.9m, $4.5m. The median is the average of the 5th and 6th sales: $1.325m. The mean is $1.65m — pulled up by the $4.5m outlier. Quoting the median gives a much more representative picture of "typical" Carlton house pricing.
Common confusion. Comparing this month's suburb median to last month's and concluding "prices rose 8%" is statistically meaningless if only 6 sales occurred. Use rolling 12-month medians for small suburbs, or hedonic indices like CoreLogic HVI for monthly comparisons.