Every quarterly report we publish carries a chart most people skip: period of ownership. Two stacked bars, one for existing owners and one for recent sellers, split by how long they have held the property.
It is the least glamorous chart in the report and probably the most useful, because it tells you something a price average cannot — who you will be competing against.
The settled majority
| Suburb | > 11 years | 8–10 years | 5–7 years | < 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monument | 47% | 7% | 18% | 27% |
| Kenmare | 46% | 11% | 17% | 26% |
| Noordheuwel | 46% | 11% | 17% | 26% |
| Rant en Dal | 46% | 13% | 16% | 25% |
| Chancliff Ridge | 38% | 12% | 22% | 28% |
Four of the five suburbs sit within a percentage point of each other: roughly 46–47% of owners have held for more than eleven years. These are established, low-churn suburbs where people arrive and stay.
Chancliff Ridge is the outlier at 38%, with a correspondingly larger 5–7 year band. That is the signature of a newer suburb — one where a meaningful share of the stock simply has not existed long enough for anyone to have owned it for eleven years.
Now look at who is selling
The second bar is where it gets interesting, because it does not track the first.
| Suburb | > 11 years | 8–10 years | 5–7 years | < 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monument | 55% | 10% | 20% | 14% |
| Rant en Dal | 51% | 12% | 12% | 26% |
| Noordheuwel | 47% | 9% | 13% | 32% |
| Kenmare | 41% | 16% | 16% | 27% |
| Chancliff Ridge | 32% | 22% | 18% | 28% |
In Monument, 55% of recent sellers had owned for more than eleven years — well above the 47% who fall into that band overall. Long-tenure owners there are selling at a higher rate than their share of the suburb would suggest.
In Chancliff Ridge the pattern reverses: only 32% of sellers were long-tenure, while the 8–10 year band jumps to 22% — nearly double its 12% share of owners. That is a suburb where people are moving on at a defined life stage rather than after a lifetime.
Noordheuwel shows the highest short-tenure selling of the five, at 32% under five years. Some of that is ordinary churn in the largest suburb of the group; some of it is people who bought recently and moved again quickly.
Why this matters when you price
- Long-tenure sellers price differently. Someone who has owned for fifteen years is usually sitting on substantial equity and is far less driven by what they paid. They can hold out. If you are competing against a lot of them, expect patient pricing rather than desperate pricing.
- Short-tenure sellers are more constrained. A seller five years in has less equity and a bond that has barely amortised. They have a floor below which they simply cannot go, which shapes how the bottom of the market behaves.
- A high-churn suburb means more competing stock. More turnover means more homes on the market at any given moment, and more of them look like yours.
None of this shows up in a median price. It is the sort of thing you only see if you look at who is transacting — which is what the deeds data lets us do, suburb by suburb, every quarter.