The Lower North Shore is doing better than the Budget headlines would suggest — and Mosman is the centre
A buyer’s-agent read of the most recent registered-sales data — the most positive of our three regional reads through the post-Budget window, with Mosman at the centre of buyer interest.
A Sarah Kaye & Co Research note on the May 2026 Budget and what registered-sales data is — and isn’t — showing across the Lower North Shore, with Mosman the suburb buyers most consistently ask about by name.
Most coverage of the May Budget’s property tax changes has framed them as the dominant force on the Sydney property market this winter. As a buyers’ agency operating across the Lower North Shore — Mosman, Cremorne, Neutral Bay, Kirribilli, Milsons Point, Cammeray, Northbridge, Crows Nest, St Leonards and Lane Cove — our own analysis of the most recent registered-sales data tells the most positive story of our three Sydney coverage regions. The Lower North Shore house market has firmed. The unit market has held. And Mosman, as ever, sits at the centre of buyer interest — the suburb we are profiling in this piece for that reason.
What the tax changes were supposed to achieve
The five reforms
The Treasurer’s own modelling framed the goal in surprisingly modest terms. Five property tax reforms — negative gearing abolished for new investors in established property, the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount replaced with inflation indexation, a 30 per cent minimum capital gains rate, pre-1985 assets brought into the tax net, and a 30 per cent minimum on discretionary trust distributions — together are projected to deliver 75,000 additional first-home buyers over a decade, lift the home ownership rate from roughly 66 to 67 per cent, and put $4.81 a week in additional take-home pay into a typical working household’s pocket from July 2028 onward.
What Treasury’s own modelling says
Read in context, those are meaningful structural policy moves but modest lived outcomes. A one-percentage-point lift in home ownership over ten years. Less than five dollars a week in additional pay, two years from now. Treasury says the package will shave roughly two percentage points off house price growth over two to three years — a number the bank analyst desks have variously revised to three or four per cent. None of these figures, in isolation, would normally produce a market response on the scale that some of the post-Budget commentary has implied.
What our own data has actually shown so far
It is too early to fully separate the impact of the tax changes from everything else that is happening in the property market. Much of the Budget package had been telegraphed in the months before May, which means a meaningful share was likely already factored into buyer and vendor decisions through late 2025. The macroeconomic backdrop — the cash rate at 4.35 per cent, headline inflation at 4.6 per cent, the Iran war keeping oil prices around US$100 a barrel, and construction costs running 10 to 25 per cent above counterfactual — has been pulling its weight too. Pretending we can cleanly attribute the recent softening to the tax architecture alone overstates what any single signal can tell us.
How we read the registered-sales data
We run our own analysis on the NSW Valuer General’s settled-sales data — every legally registered property transfer in our coverage area, drawn directly from Land Registry Services. We compared two four-week windows of contract activity across ten suburbs of the Lower North Shore — Mosman, Cremorne, Neutral Bay, Kirribilli, Milsons Point, Cammeray, Northbridge, Crows Nest, St Leonards and Lane Cove. The pre-Christmas window ran from 28 November to 25 December 2025; the most recent window with a statistically meaningful sample ran from 13 March to 9 April 2026.
Houses firmed across the Lower North Shore
Lower North Shore houses firmed between the two windows. The aggregate house contract median moved from $3.55 million pre-Christmas to $3.74 million in the most recent window — a rise of 5.4 per cent. That is the most positive house read across our three Sydney coverage regions. The Upper North Shore came in essentially flat at minus 0.3 per cent. The Northern Beaches came in at exactly zero. The Lower North Shore moved up. Mosman, the highest-volume Lower North Shore suburb, held essentially flat at minus 1.2 per cent on a modest sample of 17 settlements. Cammeray, Lane Cove, Neutral Bay and Northbridge all firmed by double digits. Cremorne is the only LNS suburb that softened on the house side, and only on a small sample of four transactions.
Units held — with a striking signal in Cremorne
Lower North Shore units have been the more nuanced story at the aggregate level. The aggregate unit median moved from $1.30 million pre-Christmas to $1.28 million in the most recent window — a decline of 1.7 per cent. Underneath that flat aggregate, though, Cremorne units are the most striking single signal in our three-region read this month: a jump of more than 20 per cent in the median unit contract price on samples of 16 in each window. The most likely composition driver is a shift in the type of unit settling — fewer entry-level studios and one-bedroom stock pre-Christmas, more two- and three-bedroom prestige stock in the most recent window. Cremorne sits across a wide quality range, from harbour-glimpse refurbished walk-ups around $700,000 through to full-floor blue-chip apartments on Murdoch and Milson Roads at $4 million-plus. A four-week window that catches two or three of the higher-tier sales can move the median sharply. We are watching the next two months of Cremorne data closely before treating this as a structural shift, but the direction is unambiguous.
Mosman is the centre of the story
The address everyone asks about
Mosman is the address nearly every prospective Lower North Shore buyer asks about by name. The Military Road and Spit Junction precincts, the harbour-facing aspect across Mosman Bay and Balmoral, the cluster of independent schools through to Queenwood and Mosman High, and the historic prestige stock between Bradleys Head and Beauty Point combine into something few other Sydney suburbs offer in one place. When clients walk into our office looking at the Lower North Shore for the first time, Mosman is almost always the first suburb on the list.
What the four-week data shows for Mosman
On the four-week registered-sales comparison, Mosman houses held essentially flat at minus 1.2 per cent on a sample of 17 settlements. Mosman units showed a modest 7 per cent uplift over the same window on a similarly modest sample. Both figures should be read as four-week directional rather than precise — suburb-level percentages on samples this size are not the firm ground we would build a recommendation on. Directionally, the Mosman read for this window is mild house flatness against the broader Lower North Shore house firming, and a modest unit lift consistent with the aggregate unit picture landing close to flat. No Mosman-specific reset is hiding in the data.
The longer Mosman trend and the February correction
Earlier this month we published a public correction to our February 2026 Mosman Property Market Report, walking back two specific claims we had made on that suburb. The four-week comparison above is a narrower lens than the corrected longer-window analysis. Neither of the four-week figures above changes the longer-window correction we already published — they are different time slices of the same market. The Mosman unit trend over the longer window remains soft. The four-week most-recent window happens to have caught a slightly higher mix of settlements. Buyers thinking about Mosman should plan around the longer trend, not the latest four-week median. We will continue to update the longer-window Mosman analysis on its own publication cadence, separate from this Budget-window read.
What it means for buyers thinking about Mosman
The more relevant signal for Mosman is the depth of buyer interest, which has not softened in the way some of the post-Budget commentary would imply. Our own pipeline reflects this directly. Mosman inspections in the family-home segment — the $5 million-plus bracket where the suburb competes with Cremorne, Northbridge and the Eastern Suburbs on stock and on schools — remain well-attended. Buyers actively looking at Mosman over the next two quarters should plan around the macro setting rather than around an expected price fall. The suburb is unlikely to offer a meaningful price reset in this window. The strongest single data signal across the Lower North Shore this month sits in Cremorne units, not Mosman houses — and we covered that in the data section above. For buyers focused on Mosman specifically, the practical read is to engage actively, knowing that the depth of competing buyer interest has not gone anywhere.
What we are setting aside
The auction clearance headline
One widely-quoted signal we are explicitly setting aside is the headline that Sydney’s preliminary auction clearance rate fell six percentage points in the week after the Budget. On both statistical and methodological grounds, we would not anchor any conclusion on that figure. The clearance rate is a fraction whose denominator depends on which auctions are reported as sold, withdrawn or passed in, and the reporting timing of those outcomes can shift the number meaningfully week-on-week without anything actually changing in the market. A six-point move on one weekend is not statistically significant. (We covered the structural reasons in detail in our piece on Sydney’s Northern Beaches auction clearance rate.)
What we see in our day-to-day practice
Having lived on Sydney’s northern side of the harbour for the better part of twenty years and operated a buyers’ agency for the last seven, we know what an active Saturday auction circuit looks like. This is not it. The softening of the auction market has been happening for several months, not since Budget night. The Budget may have accelerated it. It did not cause it. Despite having secured numerous properties for clients over the past few months, we genuinely cannot remember the last time we attended a Saturday auction ourselves. Increasingly, properties that selling agents originally placed on auction campaigns are being settled before auction day — sold prior, withdrawn, or quietly rolled into a private treaty conversation. The lower public auction volumes are partly a consequence of that shift in agent behaviour, not only of buyer reticence.
At inspections
At inspections we are seeing fewer people through. In a meaningful number of cases this month we have been the only party inspecting a property at all. And yet our own pipeline has not been busier in the seven years we have been running this practice. There are still serious buyers in the Lower North Shore market. They are simply being more rigorous in their approach, doing more due diligence before committing, and — increasingly — working through buyers’ agents rather than turning up cold to a Saturday morning auction. The composition of who is in the market has shifted. The depth of activity has not.
What this means going forward, by cohort
Existing homeowners and future buyers
For existing Lower North Shore homeowners, the direct tax impact on your own home is approximately zero. The principal-residence capital gains exemption was untouched. The indirect impact — slower price growth on a $5 million Mosman or Cremorne family home through to 2031 — works out to less than a single year of typical growth in our markets. And on the most recent four months of registry data, even that modest indirect impact has not shown up at the aggregate level. The renovation can resume; the property pages can go back in the recycling.
For future buyers, the tax architecture is genuinely in your favour. Less investor competition at auctions, slightly slower price growth in the broader Sydney market, modestly higher borrowing capacity once the income-tax bracket changes land. The catch — and our data is pretty clear on this — is that Lower North Shore prices are firming, not falling. Buyers looking at Mosman, Cremorne, Neutral Bay or Northbridge across the next two quarters should not expect a meaningful price reset, and may need to compete harder than the post-Budget headlines suggest. Plan around the macro setting (the cash rate, construction costs) rather than around an expected price fall.
Existing investors and renters
For existing investors already holding Lower North Shore property bought before the evening of 12 May, the negative gearing rules on those assets are grandfathered indefinitely. The new capital gains rules will apply when you sell, and on long-held property the inflation-indexation method with the 30 per cent minimum floor usually costs more than the old 50 per cent discount. The changes are asking you to hold, not trade. Anyone with investment property in a discretionary trust should be modelling the post-2028 distribution math with their accountant well before the rollover window opens in mid-2027.
For renters on the Lower North Shore, the Budget’s silence is the loudest thing in it. Slower investor activity over the next two to three years will mean a smaller pipeline of new rental supply, in a market where rental stock on the Lower North Shore — particularly for established units in Cremorne, Neutral Bay, Mosman and around the St Leonards and Crows Nest commercial cores — is structurally limited. Treasury’s published estimate is roughly two dollars a week of additional rent pressure. Our working assumption is quite a bit higher in supply-constrained pockets over the next twelve to eighteen months. The cohort that received nothing in this Budget will probably absorb most of its real cost.
Why we say what we say
Most property commentary you will read across the coming months will frame the tax changes as the centre of the story. They are part of the story. On our data, they are not the largest part for the next eighteen months — and on the Lower North Shore specifically, they are not yet showing up as actual price weakness at the aggregate level. House prices have firmed. Units have held. The cash rate, oil prices, construction costs and the broader pace of household debt servicing matter more for almost every Lower North Shore property decision being made today. That is what we are telling our clients, and that is what the data — read carefully — is telling us.
Methodology and sources
Source dataset: NSW Valuer General Property Sales Information bulk feed, accessed under the NSW Open Data Policy (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Comparison windows: four weeks before Christmas 2025 (28 November to 25 December 2025) vs the most recent four weeks (13 March to 9 April 2026). Coverage: ten Lower North Shore suburbs — Mosman, Cremorne, Neutral Bay, Kirribilli, Milsons Point, Cammeray, Northbridge, Crows Nest, St Leonards and Lane Cove.
Filtering: arms-length residential sales only; standard price-range and same-day same-price cluster filters applied.
Sample size caveat: four-week windows are narrower than the eight-week windows we use for the quarterly Sydney’s Northern Suburbs price tracker. Suburb-level movements within four weeks should be read as directional rather than precise. The Cremorne unit signal in particular should be treated as directional until we have another four to eight weeks of data to confirm or disconfirm.
Mosman context: refer to our public correction of the February 2026 Mosman Property Market Report (separate post).
Treasury figures and Budget package details: 2026–27 Federal Budget Papers and accompanying Treasurer’s modelling.
About the author
Mike Kaye is Co-Founder and Director of Sarah Kaye & Co., a boutique, director-led buyers agency working across Sydney’s Northern Suburbs — the Northern Beaches, the Lower North Shore, and the Upper North Shore. Mike leads Sarah Kaye & Co Research, the firm’s in-house analytics practice. A former Accenture Global Partner and Australian Army Officer, he studied property law, valuation, and economics at UNSW and is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. His commentary has been profiled in the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, and AICD Magazine. As a Northern Beaches buyers agent, Mike works exclusively for buyers — fixed-fee, no kickbacks, with over 75% of clients’ homes secured off-market.