Selling in a falling market: how Perth sellers are still getting sold

The Perth market has fallen since the federal budget of 12 May 2026, and there is no point pretending otherwise. We wrote about exactly what the budget changed and why the winter headlines missed it, and at the top of the apartment market we have watched around 20 per cent come off between the deals written before budget night and the deals being written now.

Here is the part the headlines also miss: sellers are still selling, every week. Not by luck, and not by waiting for the old market to come back. They are selling because they are doing a small number of things right, and each of those things matters more in a falling market than it ever did in a rising one. This article is the list.

Know who your buyer is now

The budget took most investors out of established property. An established apartment bought today loses negative gearing against wages from 1 July 2027 and faces the new capital gains regime, while a new build keeps the old advantages, so investors have largely stopped bidding on established stock.

That means your buyer is almost certainly an owner-occupier, very often a first home buyer using the 5 per cent deposit scheme. Owner-occupiers do not buy a spreadsheet. They walk in, they feel something or they do not, and they compare your property against every other one they saw that weekend. Everything below follows from that single fact.

Price under the market, not behind it

Perth has been here before. Through 2017, 2018 and 2019 we sold week in, week out through a long falling market, and it taught a lesson we have never forgotten: in a falling market you have to be the best priced property of your kind, because if you are not, somebody else will soon drop their price and take that position from you. Chasing the market down from above is how sellers end up following it all the way to the bottom.

Getting under the market sounds like it costs you money. In practice it is how you get the best result, because the best priced property is the one every active buyer inspects, and buyers who fear missing out compete. An honest price attracts a crowd; a hopeful price attracts silence, then a price reduction, then another, with the listing going stale in between. We have seen both versions play out hundreds of times, and the seller who starts under the market almost always finishes ahead of the seller who started above it.

Let competition find the true price

Pricing under the market only works when the competition it creates is captured. That is why every KPR campaign runs on Openn, the offer platform that ranks offers in real time. Buyers can see where they stand and improve their position, sellers watch the result build, and the price stops being a guess and becomes the outcome of an open contest. Underpricing without competition would be giving the property away. Underpricing with Openn is a strategy, and it is how the final number so often lands above where a conventional campaign would have finished. Openn is paid for by KPR, so it costs the seller nothing.

Present properly, without renovating

Nobody is suggesting a full renovation. The aim is the cheapest possible path to a property that photographs well and feels cared for, because an owner-occupier buys the feeling first and checks the numbers second. In practice that usually means some combination of the following, and rarely all of it: fresh paint, modern LED lighting (LED does not mean downlights: plenty of units, especially those with concrete ceilings, simply have no room to cut downlights in, and a flat LED oyster light can go onto a concrete ceiling, or any ceiling, at a fraction of the cost, while downlights that are already LED are perfect as they are), new light switches and power points, new blinds, and where the floor is letting the property down, the most economical flooring that presents well. Small dollars, spent where buyers actually look.

Then stage it. In this market staging is not a garnish, it is one of the most reliable returns on money a seller can spend, because a styled property gives an emotional buyer something to fall for and photographs that stop the scroll. We wrote about what styling did across six real KPR campaigns, and the case has only strengthened since.

Time the tenancy

With investors scarce, a property that can only be shown around a tenant’s schedule, presented with a tenant’s furniture, is fighting with one hand behind its back. Ideally the property goes to market vacant, presented at its best and staged. Where that is not practical, sell as close to the end of the tenancy as possible, so the buyer who wants to live there can actually move in. There is a right way to manage all of this fairly for the tenant, and we handle it every week: our guide to selling a tenanted property covers it properly.

Use an agency that brings buyers from everywhere

The last lever is reach. A buyer for a two-bedroom apartment is not searching one suburb, they are searching a budget across many suburbs, and an agency that works one suburb never meets most of them. KPR sells strata property across the whole Perth market, as strata specialists since 2012 led by a director who has specialised in strata since 1998. For apartments, units, villas, and townhouses, that comes with a buyer database of more than 8,000 active buyers, updated weekly and emailed before the weekend home opens, which is how buyers from other suburbs keep turning up at our first home opens and bidding against the locals. More buyers in the room is what turns an under-the-market price into an above-expectations result.

The marketing itself, professional photography, floor plan, signboard, and every major portal, is a package worth more than $3,000 that KPR carries entirely. No sale, no cost.

The short version

The market has fallen, and it may keep adjusting for a while yet. The sellers getting sold are the ones who accept the market as it is: price under it rather than chase it down, spend small and smart on presentation, stage it, go to market vacant or near the end of the tenancy, and put the property in front of the largest possible buyer pool with competition doing the final lift. If you want to know what that looks like for your property, with sales evidence from both sides of budget night, ask us for an appraisal.

This article is general information about market conditions and selling strategy, not legal, financial or tax advice. Every property and every scheme differs. If something turns on it, get advice for your circumstances.

By James Yeoman, Director of KPR Perth Pty Ltd T/A Key Performance Real Estate