Where property prices are rebounding around the country

Australian home prices rebounded strongly in 2023, new figures released today have shown.

The Home Value Index from property data provider CoreLogic revealed prices surged by 8.1 percent last year after falling -4.9 percent in 2022. However, recorded growth is nothing like the rises in 2021, which saw home prices swell by 24.5 percent.

CoreLogic research director Tim Lawless said while the greatest increases were seen at the start of 2023, consistent interest rate rises announced by the RBA put a dampener on growth as the year progressed, with just a 0.4 percent increase in December.

“This was the smallest gain in our national monthly HVI since values started rising in February,” Mr Lawless said. “After monthly growth in home values peaked in May at 1.3 percent, a rate hike in June and another in November, along with persistent cost of living pressures, worsening affordability challenges, rising advertised stock levels and low consumer sentiment, have progressively taken some heat out of the market through the second half of the year.”

While regional areas saw record price rises during COVID, it is now the Australian capitals leading increases in home values, Mr Lawless said.

“Stronger conditions across capital city markets is a reversal of the early COVID trend which saw regional markets experience higher demand amid strong internal migration,” he said. “Regional migration trends have mostly normalised through 2023, and the significant capital gains recorded through 2020 to 2022 has meant many regional markets have become less affordable.”

However, growth across capital cities is uneven, with Perth recording the highest annual increases at 15.2 percent, followed by Brisbane on 13.1 percent and Sydney on 11.1 percent. The results were followed by Adelaide (8.8 percent), Melbourne (3.5 percent) and Canberra (0.5 percent). Darwin and Hobart values declined over the past 12 months, down -0.1 percent and -0.8 percent respectively.

In Perth, the top performing suburb was Armadale, up 25.2 percent, followed by Gosnells, 22.6 percent.

In Brisbane, home values in the suburb of Nathan are up 22 percent on last year, followed by Mt Gravatt, up 21.1 percent.

For the Sydney market, Blacktown lead the way, with a 15.8 percent increase in home values, followed by the inner west suburbs of Marrickville – Sydenham – Petersham, which increased by 15.3 percent.

Rank	SA3 Name	SA4 Name	Median Value	Annual change
*Greater Sydney*
1	Blacktown	Sydney -Blacktown	$969,287	15.8%
2	Marrickville -Sydenham -Petersham	Sydney -City and Inner South	$1,741,931	15.3%
3	Hornsby	Sydney -North Sydney and Hornsby	$1,485,422	15.3%
4	Strathfield -Burwood -Ashfield	Sydney -Inner West	$917,641	14.9%
5	Eastern Suburbs -North	Sydney -Eastern Suburbs	$1,988,175	14.6%
6	Warringah	Sydney -Northern Beaches	$2,068,585	14.5%
7	Canterbury	Sydney -Inner South West	$1,085,111	14.3%
8	Mount Druitt	Sydney -Blacktown	$812,868	14.1%
9	Merrylands -Guildford	Sydney -Parramatta	$1,060,399	14.1%
10	Leichhardt	Sydney -Inner West	$2,007,850	14.0%
*Greater Melbourne*
1	Darebin -North	Melbourne -North East	$762,619	7.9%
2	Banyule	Melbourne -North East	$935,214	7.7%
3	Monash	Melbourne -South East	$1,223,086	7.6%
4	Knox	Melbourne -Outer East	$910,533	7.5%
5	Manningham -West	Melbourne -Inner East	$1,388,013	7.1%
6	Manningham -East	Melbourne -Outer East	$1,539,018	6.9%
7	Whitehorse -West	Melbourne -Inner East	$1,213,085	6.7%
8	Whitehorse -East	Melbourne -Outer East	$1,185,513	6.1%
9	Casey -North	Melbourne -South East	$808,703	5.3%
10	Casey -South	Melbourne -South East	$758,745	5.1%
*Greater Brisbane*
1	Nathan	Brisbane -South	$1,079,497	22.0%
2	Mt Gravatt	Brisbane -South	$1,117,075	21.2%
3	Sunnybank	Brisbane -South	$1,026,758	19.4%
4	Carindale	Brisbane -South	$1,212,544	19.1%
5	Holland Park -Yeronga	Brisbane -South	$756,166	18.8%
6	Springwood -Kingston	Logan -Beaudesert	$638,552	17.1%
7	Chermside	Brisbane -North	$945,095	16.7%
8	Rocklea -Acacia Ridge	Brisbane -South	$935,200	16.2%
9	Nundah	Brisbane -North	$794,173	15.7%
10	Forest Lake -Oxley	Ipswich	$665,472	15.4%
*Greater Adelaide*
1	Playford	Adelaide -North	$474,782	14.3%
2	Gawler -Two Wells	Adelaide -North	$590,250	13.7%
3	Salisbury	Adelaide -North	$582,159	13.2%
4	Tea Tree Gully	Adelaide -North	$700,396	11.5%
5	Port Adelaide -West	Adelaide -West	$691,116	11.0%
6	Onkaparinga	Adelaide -South	$663,042	9.9%
7	Port Adelaide -East	Adelaide -North	$737,926	8.5%
8	Marion	Adelaide -South	$797,606	8.3%
9	Campbelltown	Adelaide -Central and Hills	$859,213	8.2%
10	Burnside	Adelaide -Central and Hills	$1,416,110	8.2%

Top 10 capital cities SA3s with the highest 12-month value growth – Dwellings. Source: CoreLogic

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.

Where property prices are rebounding around the country

Interest rate rises and cost of living pressures resulted in mixed results on home values around Australia