Adelaide median lot price hits $417,500, passes Melbourne

Adelaide’s median vacant lot price hit $417,500 in the March quarter of 2026, overtaking Melbourne’s $406,000 for the first time on record, according to Oliver Hume’s quarterly land index released on 30 April. It is the most recent published reading of the index: no June or September 2026 quarter has been released, so the milestone reflects data that is now several months old rather than a this-week shift in either market.

Why it matters

For agents working Adelaide’s growth corridors, the milestone upends a comparison buyers have relied on for years. Adelaide has long been pitched as the affordable alternative to the bigger southern capital, a city where a young family or an investor could buy land for meaningfully less than in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. According to Oliver Hume’s quarterly land index, that gap has not just closed, it has reversed. Anyone fielding questions from a buyer weighing Adelaide against Melbourne on raw land cost now needs a different answer than they would have given twelve months ago.

The rise also arrived alongside a sharp fall in the number of lots changing hands, which points to supply, not just demand, doing much of the work on price. Oliver Hume’s companion release, titled to reflect an Adelaide land market that “rolls on despite supply issues,” frames the result as a market where buyers are competing harder for a shrinking pool of available blocks rather than one where appetite alone pushed the median higher.

The numbers

Oliver Hume’s index recorded the $417,500 median vacant lot price as an 11.3% rise quarter-on-quarter and a 30.9% jump year-on-year, among the steepest annual moves the research house has reported for any capital city land market. Sales volume fell by more than 30% on the December quarter, from 545 lots to just 373, according to the release.

Despite the higher median price per lot, the price per square metre actually fell during the quarter. Oliver Hume attributed that divergence to smaller lots making up a larger share of what sold, meaning buyers paid more per block while receiving less land for it. That split matters for anyone advising clients on value: a rising median lot price is not the same signal as a rising land value per square metre, and the two moved in opposite directions in the same quarter. Oliver Hume is a private land-market research house rather than a government statistical agency, and its quarterly index is compiled from its own sales data across the capital city markets it tracks, Adelaide and Melbourne among them.

What’s next

Because the March quarter index is the most recent one published, agents should treat the Melbourne overtake as a milestone drawn from that release rather than as fresh, this-week news. The next instalment of Oliver Hume’s index, covering the June quarter, will show whether Adelaide’s lead over Melbourne holds, narrows, or widens further as more lots reach settlement.

Oliver Hume’s release ties the volume drop to tight supply across Adelaide’s broader land market, a constraint that lines up with the tightening building pipeline already visible in Adelaide’s wider construction market. Until a fresher land-price index is published, the working figure for anyone pricing land in Adelaide’s growth corridors is the $417,500 March quarter median, with smaller lot sizes pushing the per-lot price up even as the per-square-metre rate eases.