The median Parramatta apartment sold for $695,000 in June 2016. In June 2026 it sold for $623,000. Over the same ten years the median Parramatta house went from $961,000 to $1,610,000.
So the apartments went backwards for ten years while the houses around them rose by two thirds. Building approvals data explains why.
What Parramatta apartments did
CoreLogic publishes an annual median for every suburb. Here is Parramatta, both property types, indexed so you can put them side by side.
Houses finished the decade 67.5% higher, or 5.30% a year. Units finished 10.4% lower, or -1.09% a year. That is before inflation, before strata, before the stamp duty you paid on the way in.
Every market in the catchment shows a version of it.
| Suburb | Unit median 2016 | Unit median 2026 | 10 years | House, 10 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Parramatta | $695,000 | $623,000 | -10.4% | +67.5% |
| Harris Park | $520,000 | $512,000 | -1.5% | thin sales |
| Westmead | $579,000 | $590,100 | +1.9% | +71.5% |
| Granville | $499,000 | $531,000 | +6.4% | +58.5% |
| North Parramatta | $562,000 | $694,500 | +23.6% | +79.7% |
North Parramatta is the best of the five. It still delivered less than a third of what its own houses did. Harris Park and Parramatta went backwards in nominal terms. Merrylands and Auburn next door tell the same story on a five year view, where they finished in the bottom three of nine Sydney unit markets under $650,000.
Rents rose 45% while prices fell
Weak prices can look like a lack of demand, but Parramatta’s rents are strong.
The median unit rent went from $470 a week to $680. That is up 44.7%. Tenant demand is not the problem. Parramatta is Sydney’s second CBD, Westmead is next door, and people want to live there enough to pay half as much again in rent as they did in 2016.
That rent against that price is why the yield looks so good now. At $680 a week on a $623,000 median, a Parramatta unit computes to 5.68% gross. In 2016 the same arithmetic gave you 3.52%. The yield improved because the rent went up while the price stood still, which is a very different thing from Parramatta getting better. It is the same trap we found in Melbourne’s blue chip unit markets.
17,206 apartments, 2,610 houses
The supply side comes from ABS building approvals for the Parramatta SA3. That covers the CBD, Harris Park, Rosehill, North Parramatta and Wentworthville-Westmead. It also takes in the lower-density suburbs of Northmead, North Rocks, Winston Hills, Toongabbie and Pendle Hill.
Fifteen years, 17,206 apartments against 2,610 houses. Apartments were 76% of every new home approved there, counting townhouses and semis alongside the houses. Four years in the middle of that run, FY2015 through FY2018, put 7,143 apartments into the pipeline on their own.
That core is only part of the council area. Across the whole City of Parramatta LGA, approvals averaged 2,837 new dwellings a year over the eight years to June 2026. Three quarters of those were apartments too. In FY2026 alone the LGA approved 2,020 of them.
Vacancy told you in 2019
New supply shows up in the rental market before it shows up in prices. SQM Research publishes vacancy by postcode. Postcode 2150 has a clear record of what happened when the approvals of 2015 and 2016 turned into finished buildings.
June 2019 hit 4.32%. That is seven months before Australia’s first COVID case, so the borders had nothing to do with it. The buildings approved three and four years earlier finished. The keys hit the market at once. There were not enough tenants that month to take them.
Vacancy is back to 1.58% in June 2026 and 1.74% in August. That is a tight rental market by any measure. So the rent is up 45%, vacancy is under 2%, and the price still has not moved.
Why apartment prices cannot run
Supply and demand set the price. The part most investors skip is that supply responds to price.
An established house in a corridor is protected by what it costs to replace it. Nobody can undercut you while land plus construction costs more than you paid. That is the whole argument for buying below replacement cost. Land is the part of that cost that’s scarce, and no planning decision creates more of it.
An apartment does not work that way. The land under a tower is divided by forty floors, so the land cost per dwelling is small and the rest is construction. More importantly, a rezoning manufactures dwellings. Lift a site from three storeys to thirty and the same piece of ground produces ten times the homes. The cost of producing one more of them barely moves.
That gives Parramatta apartments a supply curve close to flat at the feasibility price. Let prices rise far enough to make a tower stack up and the towers get built, which puts the prices back. Let them fall and construction stops. That does not help you either, because the stock already standing is what you compete against when you sell. The adjustment happens in the number of apartments, not the price of them.
Apartments are also close substitutes for each other in a way houses are not. A 2019 two bedroom on level 12 and a 2026 two bedroom on level 14 are the same product. A buyer choosing between them is comparing price alone. Two houses a street apart are never that interchangeable.
What is still coming to Parramatta
The pipeline ahead is bigger than the one that produced the last ten years.
- 19,500 new completed homes by 2029. That is the NSW housing target for City of Parramatta, against an existing 108,290 homes. An 18% increase in the dwelling stock of the council area in five years. The target needs 3,900 completions a year. The LGA has been approving 2,837 dwellings a year, and approvals always run ahead of completions, so hitting it means approving well more than it does now.
- Up to 13,000 homes at Westmead South. The draft rezoning of the 125 hectare precinct was exhibited until 16 September 2026. It allows up to 38 storeys near the Metro station. It should be finalised in 2027. Westmead South sits in Cumberland council, which carries its own 12,200 home target, so these are 13,000 homes on top of Parramatta’s 19,500 and in the same rental catchment.
- 1,800 homes in the Church Street North precinct, rezoned for buildings up to 63 metres from 1 July 2024.
Sydney Metro West is targeted to open in 2032. The infrastructure is real. The catch is that the same planning process delivering the station is rezoning the land around it, and the new apartments are likely to arrive before the trains.
Westmead has the same problem
Westmead is where investors push back hardest. It has the health precinct. The Metro station is coming.
Westmead units went from $579,000 to $590,100 over the decade. That is 1.9% in total, or 0.19% a year. Westmead houses over the same ten years went from $1,166,000 to $2,000,000.
The hospital expansion, the research institutes and the students were there the whole decade. That demand was real, and unit prices still didn’t grow. The planning answer to that demand is more dwellings, now up to 38 storeys in the draft Westmead South rezoning.
Same city, different supply
The cleanest test is a Sydney unit market that did not get the towers. Sutherland Shire has a 2029 housing target of 6,000 homes on a base of 91,110. That is 6.6% of its stock against Parramatta’s 18.0%.
Nine markets, same city, same ten years, same interest rates. The four Shire markets took the top four places. The worst of them beat the best of the five Parramatta markets. What separates the two groups is how many new competing dwellings the planning system let in, not amenity or transport or jobs.
What this data does not prove
Two limits on the above.
These are medians, not index values. A median can drift down when the mix of what sells changes. A decade of new one and two bedroom stock completing is exactly the kind of thing that shifts a mix. The rent series and the vacancy series are independent of that problem and point the same way. The price numbers still carry the caveat.
Nine suburbs is a small sample. We picked the Shire because it is the obvious low supply comparison. Treat it as an illustration of the mechanism, not a measured effect size.
When a Parramatta unit still works
We still buy in Parramatta, but we don’t buy tower apartments there for growth.
A villa unit on its own title in a block of two to six, single storey with a courtyard, has a real land component and a small strata. It is not exposed to a thirty storey rezoning the way a tower apartment is. It behaves much closer to a house, even though the listing calls both of them units.
A tower apartment can still do a job if cash flow is the job. At 5.68% gross it services itself in a way a $1.6 million house on 2.42% never will. Some portfolios are missing exactly that piece. Price it as an income asset and assume nothing from the capital, which is the trade-off we set out in growth versus yield. We put houses and units side by side over thirty years in house or unit. And a buyers agent in Parramatta should be showing you the approvals pipeline for any building they put in front of you.
Where the same test points instead
The question that sank Parramatta works on any market. Of the new homes approved here over the past fifteen years, how many were the kind a rezoning can multiply? It is the first of the five checks in are apartments a good investment.
| Market (SA3) | Apartments approved | Houses approved | Apartments as a share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parramatta, NSW | 17,206 | 2,610 | 76% |
| Rockhampton, QLD | 560 | 7,272 | 6% |
| Launceston, TAS | 246 | 4,644 | 5% |
| Orange, NSW | 187 | 4,418 | 4% |
Those three are markets we have already published research on, not a shortlist. What they share is that the new stock competing with you is a house. Somebody has to buy the land for it and build it, at a cost that has gone one way.
The decade bears it out. Rockhampton City’s median house went $218,000 to $412,000, up 89%, and still computes to 6.31% gross on a $500 rent. Launceston went $365,000 to $769,500, up 111%, on 4.05%. Orange went $342,500 to $749,995, up 119%, on 4.16%. The Parramatta apartment went backwards on a 5.68% yield.
Growth and yield in the same asset is the thing a tower apartment cannot give you. It is most of the reason we buy across every state instead of one city. There is detail on each of those markets in Central Queensland, Launceston and Central West NSW, and the general case in buying outside your own city.
A low apartment share is one test. It does not make a market good on its own. Vacancy direction, sales volume and price against replacement cost still decide it. That is why we run the same twelve checks on every market before we buy anything.
If Parramatta is where you actually want to live, there is a simpler answer than owning the apartment. It rents for $680 a week. Rent it, and own the growth somewhere else. That is rentvesting, and on these numbers it is the better option.
What ten years of supply did to price
Parramatta had the population growth. It had the infrastructure spend, the employment base and a rental market that pushed rents up 44.7%. Every demand ingredient an investor looks for was there for ten straight years. The median apartment still finished lower than it started.
Each time demand rose, more apartments were approved to meet it, so prices went backwards over ten years. Over the same decade, houses rose 89% to 119% in markets where every new home needs new land. Our capital growth calculator shows what that kind of growth does to a purchase over 10, 20 and 30 years.
Data sources. Annual median prices and weekly rents are CoreLogic figures accessed through Your Investment Property. Medians run June 2016 to June 2026 and rents August 2016 to August 2026, re-checked 26 September 2026. Yields are computed by us as weekly rent times 52 divided by the median. Dwelling approvals are ABS Building Approvals by SA2 and by LGA, financial years to June, re-checked 26 September 2026. Vacancy rates are SQM Research for postcode 2150. Housing targets and rezoning figures are from the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure. Rockhampton, Launceston and Orange figures are the same CoreLogic and ABS series on the same dates, for Rockhampton City 4700, Launceston 7250 and Orange 2800 and their matching SA3s.
This is general information only and not financial advice. Speak to a qualified professional before making investment decisions.
If you are weighing a Parramatta apartment, or want to see where our data points instead, book a free discovery call.
