Brisbane's median house price has overtaken Melbourne's for the first time on record, making it the second most expensive capital city in the country, behind only Sydney.
Sit with that for a second. A decade ago this would have sounded absurd to almost anyone in the industry. Melbourne was the second city, culturally and economically, for most of my adult life. Brisbane was the affordable alternative up north.
Migration and supply explain most of it. Melbourne's dealing with higher housing supply and new investor-targeted taxes that have cooled its market, while Brisbane's had the opposite combination for years now, strong migration crashing into a housing shortage that never really eased. Prices are just the visible output of that gap. Whether the ranking holds is a separate question. That it happened at all says something about how much has shifted.