The Northern Beaches is doing better than the Budget headlines would suggest — and Manly is the standout
A buyer’s-agent read of the most recent registered-sales data — and why the post-Budget doom-and-gloom narrative does not match what is happening on the peninsula.
A Sarah Kaye & Co Research note on the May 2026 Budget and what registered-sales data is — and isn’t — showing across the Northern Beaches, with Manly the most striking single-suburb signal.
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 from Manly across the wider Northern Beaches, our own analysis of the most recent registered-sales data tells a more nuanced story — and one that’s materially more positive than the doom-and-gloom narrative coming out of the post-Budget commentary. Manly in particular is showing real strength.
What the tax changes were supposed to achieve
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.
Read in context, these 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 changes alone overstates what any single signal can tell us.
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 37 suburbs of the Northern Beaches: the four weeks before Christmas 2025 (28 November to 25 December) against the most recent four weeks where we still have a statistically meaningful sample (13 March to 9 April 2026).
Northern Beaches houses, aggregated across the 37 suburbs, came in exactly flat at the headline level — the regional median stayed at $2.70 million between the two windows. That is a striking result given the post-Budget commentary, and a meaningfully different finding from the North Shore, where our equivalent analysis showed houses essentially flat and units down close to 20 per cent. Underneath the flat Northern Beaches headline there is divergence between suburbs. Belrose, Cromer, Killarney Heights, Narraweena and Wheeler Heights softened. Allambie Heights, Balgowlah, Forestville, Collaroy and Seaforth firmed.
Northern Beaches units have been the more interesting story. The aggregate median moved from $1.27 million pre-Christmas to $1.33 million in the most recent window — a rise of 5.1 per cent. This is countercyclical to the broader post-Budget narrative, and a meaningful contrast with what we are seeing on the North Shore. Dee Why units (the highest-volume suburb in the Northern Beaches data, 39 settlements in Period 1 and 31 in Period 2) firmed modestly. Manly Vale, Collaroy and Warriewood units all held or grew. The Northern Beaches unit market has, on this comparison, strengthened rather than softened through the Budget window.
Manly is the standout suburb
Manly is doing something the rest of the Northern Beaches is not. Manly unit median prices jumped 24 per cent between the two windows, from $1.98 million to $2.44 million — on a sample of 26 settlements pre-Christmas and 18 in the most recent window. That is the cleanest single-suburb signal in this comparison and the most striking result in our entire analysis. The Manly unit market has, on this read, shown signs of firming through the same four-month window in which most of the post-Budget commentary has predicted broad weakness.
The wider Manly picture is consistent with that read. Manly is the most actively traded prestige market on the Northern Beaches by a wide margin. Across the longer 24-month registered-sales window, the suburb has seen 103 arms-length house settlements at a median of $4.77 million, and 621 unit settlements at a median of $1.78 million — that combined volume is unmatched by any other premium pocket on the peninsula. Palm Beach (median house price $5.70 million on 69 settlements) and Clontarf ($4.78 million on 46) sit above Manly on median house price, but trade at a fraction of the volume. Among the meaningful-volume unit markets, Fairlight’s median ($1.81 million across 162 settlements) sits marginally above Manly’s by a hair, which is consistent with the Manly–Fairlight cross-over we have flagged in earlier work. The story Manly tells is depth of buying competition rather than the very highest sticker price.
The prestige top of Manly is still clearing without difficulty. 30A Addison Road sold for $17.5 million in December 2025, 15 Addison Road for $15 million in June 2025, with Cliff Street, Ashburner Street and Stuart Street rounding out the recent $10 million-plus settlements. The Eastern Hill pocket between Manly Beach and Shelly Beach is where the prestige market continues to clear. The most recent four weeks of contract activity are consistent with the longer-run pattern — Manly buyers are not stepping back.
There is also a structural tailwind for the suburb that we expect to support buyer interest through 2026. The Manly Wharf precinct redevelopment now underway by the Artemus Group — the Brisbane operator behind Howard Smith Wharves — is reshaping the bottom of the Corso. A $4.5 million development application also sits with Council to redevelop the central pedestrian concourse into a continuous food and drink precinct. Whether or not you like the direction of travel, it changes what is at the end of the Corso, and Manly buyers are paying attention.
What we are setting aside
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, that is not where we would put any analytical weight. 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.)
Having lived in the area 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 — but the softening of the auction market has been happening for several months, not since Budget night. Despite having secured a number of 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 place on auction campaigns are being settled before auction day — sold prior, withdrawn, or continually ‘deferred’ until they sell by private treaty (which, interestingly, still counts as an ‘auction clearance’). Either way, the lower public auction volumes are partly a consequence of that shift in agent behaviour, not only of buyer reticence.
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 Northern Beaches 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
For existing Northern Beaches homeowners, the direct tax impact on your own home is approximately zero. The principal-residence capital gains exemption was untouched. The indirect impact — potentially slightly slower price growth on a $3.5 million Balgowlah or Freshwater family home over the next two years — 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 in our suburbs, the tax changes are 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 Northern Beaches prices are not falling in the way that some commentary implies. Buyers looking specifically at Manly, where the unit market just jumped 24 per cent and the depth of buying competition continues to outpace every other premium pocket on the peninsula, should not expect a meaningful price reset and may need to compete harder than the post-Budget headlines suggest. The same applies to the inner band more broadly — Freshwater, Balgowlah, Seaforth — where prices are holding or firming. Plan around the macro setting (the cash rate, construction costs) rather than around an expected price fall.
For existing investors already holding Northern Beaches 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 Northern Beaches, 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 Northern Beaches is already constrained — particularly in the inner-band suburbs where most new buying interest is now concentrating. Treasury’s published estimate is roughly two dollars a week of additional rent pressure. Our working assumption is quite a bit higher than this 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 Northern Beaches specifically, they are not yet showing up as actual price weakness at the aggregate level. The cash rate, oil prices, construction costs and the broader pace of household debt servicing matter more for almost every Northern Beaches 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: 37 suburbs across the Northern Beaches.
- 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.
- 24-month volume figures (Manly 103 houses / 621 units, Palm Beach 69, Clontarf 46, Fairlight 162): Sarah Kaye & Co Research, NSW Valuer General registered settlements, May 2024 – May 2026.
- 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.