A note before we begin

There’s a moment, usually just after 8pm, when the Inner West finally exhales. The traffic softens on Parramatta Road, the last takeaway bags are carried up narrow staircases in Newtown, and the light hangs low over the terraces in Annandale and Petersham. You can hear light rail slide through Lewisham and Dulwich Hill if you listen for them. From street level, it all feels casual, almost careless. From the sales results, the auction rooms and the phone calls after 9pm, you realise it’s anything but. These suburbs are not just “cool” postcodes anymore; they’re balance sheets, leverage, retirement plans and escape routes from the broader affordability crisis that’s gripping the rest of Sydney.

This space – these notes – exist because I don’t think surface-level market commentary is enough for the owners who actually live here. If you own in Marrickville, Petersham, Newtown, Stanmore, Lewisham, Forest Lodge, Leichhardt, Lilyfield, Annandale, Enmore, Summer Hill, Hurlstone Park, Dulwich Hill, Earlwood or Canterbury, you don’t need another generic line about “strong demand” and “low stock”. You need someone who walks the same streets, sits in the same auctions, watches the same buyers circling the same pockets of land – and is willing to say quietly what everyone else in the room is only hinting at.

The Inner West market right now is expensive, tense and strangely resilient. Across many of these suburbs, freestanding houses routinely trade in the $1.8–$2.3 million band and above, with some pockets running hotter again. Units in places like Marrickville, Leichhardt, Forest Lodge and neighbouring suburbs sit in that $900,000–$1.2 million corridor, depending on size and position. Sydney-wide, median house prices have pushed back into the mid–$1.5 million range, even as headlines talk about cost-of-living stress and rate pressure. At the same time, new housing approvals in NSW have fallen sharply, which means the pipeline of fresh stock is thinner than the policy speeches would suggest.This is the backdrop to every appraisal, every listing and every nervous vendor conversation.

On the ground, it doesn’t feel like data. It feels like the young family in Earlwood who stretch themselves for a bigger backyard and then watch the RBA every month like it’s a weather report. It feels like the couple in Summer Hill who bought pre-COVID and are now quietly wondering whether the school zone premium is at its peak or only just getting started. It’s the downsizer in Leichhardt who knows Norton Street has changed but still believes their street is worth more “because it always has been” – and sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not.

There’s also a psychology to these suburbs that doesn’t show up in median graphs. Buyers behave differently in Newtown than they do in Canterbury. The person bidding on a warehouse conversion in Forest Lodge isn’t thinking like the family going after a federation home in Hurlstone Park. In Dulwich Hill and Marrickville, light rail and transport patterns quietly reshape what buyers will pay to be within a certain radius of a stop. At auction, you see how all of that translates into body language – the nod that comes too quickly, the couple that steps outside to “call the broker” when they’ve already hit the number they agreed on at the kitchen table.

What I want this series to be is simple: an honest, suburb-by-suburb reading of what’s happening – and what might happen next – without the glossed-over clichés. Some entries will be heavy on numbers; others will read more like field notes from the front row of a campaign. I’ll talk about the streets that run hotter than the ones behind them, the pockets buyers fight over, the types of homes that sell first when conditions tighten, and the ones that quietly sit on the market while agents talk about “the right buyer still being out there.”

If you’re an owner, my aim is not to convince you to sell. It’s to make you feel less in the dark. Even if you’re five years away from making a move – even if you never sell at all – you should still understand what role your property plays in a market where supply is constrained, demand is selective and not all growth is created equal. If you’re a buyer, this might read like a handbook to how sellers in these suburbs think, what really motivates them, and why some homes feel overrun with competition while others slide under the radar.

Over the coming pieces, I’ll move through these 15 suburbs one by one. Marrickville will probably come first – it’s the suburb everyone loves to argue about, especially when people ask if it’s “overpriced” or still has room to run. From there, we’ll move down the line: Petersham and its terraces that trade more on feel than floor space; Newtown’s controlled chaos; Stanmore’s quiet, steady climb; Lewisham’s transport logic; the small, tightly held world of Forest Lodge; and the rest. Each suburb will get its own chapter, its own story, its own data.

None of this is meant to be neutral. I work in this market. I represent sellers here. I see who turns up to open homes, who disappears, who overpays and who walks away with a bargain nobody else noticed. I’m not trying to be a commentator looking in from the outside; I’m documenting what it feels like to be in the middle of it, with skin in the game and a front-row seat.

If you read something here that makes you feel a bit more certain – or a bit more unsettled in a useful way – then these notes are doing their job. You don’t have to agree with every take. In fact, you shouldn’t. Property is personal. That’s what keeps this corner of Sydney interesting when the rest of the city starts to blur into averages and percentages.

More soon.

— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal