Australian Property Investor Research — October 2026

After removing invalid and implausible observations, we analysed 141 rental yield sessions: 62 from people considering a purchase and 79 from owners checking a property they already hold.

Prospective buyers assessed a median gross rental yield of 4.90%, compared with 4.60% for existing owners, a gap of 0.30 percentage points.

The bottom of both ranges was almost identical: the lower quartile was 4.01% for buyers and 4.03% for owners.

The upper quartile is where they diverged. A quarter of buyer sessions assessed a gross yield of 6.12% or more, compared with 5.52% for owners.

Prospective buyers were also assessing lower-priced properties. The median property value entered by buyers was $665,000, compared with $800,000 for owners, which, as the next section shows, is closely linked to yield.

Across all 141 sessions, the median gross rental yield was 4.72%, with the middle 50% falling between 4.02% and 5.89%.

Property value was the clearest driver of that spread. Sessions with a property value under $600k had a median gross yield of 6.22%. At $1.2m and above the median was 3.51%, a difference of 2.71 percentage points.

Roughly half of all sessions (51.8%) assessed a gross yield between 4% and 6%. A further 23.4% assessed 6% or more, and 24.8% assessed less than 4%.

Of the sessions where a suburb was recorded (52 sessions across 47 suburbs), major-city locations had a median gross yield of 4.28%, compared with 4.83% for regional locations.

The gap was wider at the average: 4.70% for major cities and 5.69% for regional locations, because a handful of regional sessions assessed very high yields.

The middle 50% of regional sessions fell between 4.65% and 6.24%, against 3.66% and 4.97% for major cities.

The rental yield calculator also reports net yield once annual expenses are entered. The median net yield across the same 141 sessions was 3.85%, with the middle 50% between 2.96% and 4.83%.

The typical session lost 0.94 percentage points between gross and net yield. Prospective buyers assessed a median net yield of 3.99% and existing owners 3.71%.

8.5% of sessions entered no expenses at all, so the true gap between gross and net yield is likely to be somewhat larger than the figures above suggest.

Victoria attracted the largest share of location-based property investment research in Akweno's October dataset, accounting for 34.6%.

Queensland followed with 23.1% and New South Wales with 21.2%. Together, the three largest states accounted for 78.8% of all location-based research.

Western Australia represented a further 11.5%. Smaller volumes of research were recorded in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Tasmania, and there was no research activity recorded for the ACT.

Major-city markets remained the larger focus in October, accounting for 59.6% of location-based property research.

However, 40.4% of research activity was directed towards regional locations, up from 30% in September.

The balance differed considerably between states.

Victoria was again metropolitan-focused, with 77.8% of its research centred on Greater Melbourne. All six Western Australian sessions were in Greater Perth.

Queensland was the opposite. Only 25.0% of its research was in Greater Brisbane, with the remainder spread across regional centres including Townsville, Cairns, Toowoomba and the Sunshine Coast. In New South Wales, regional research represented 36.4% of activity.

Yield describes the return on a property. Equity describes the position an investor holds in it. This month we also analysed 135Australian sessions on Akweno's equity forecast calculator (48 from people considering a purchase and 87 from owners checking a property they hold) to see how much was owed against the properties being modelled.

The median property value entered was $800,000 with a median loan of $440,000, leaving median equity of $384,000. The median loan-to-value ratio was 55.2%, with the middle 50% of sessions between 35.5% and 72.4%.

Buyers and owners reported almost identical loan-to-value ratios (55.2% and 55.3%). The difference was in scale: buyers were modelling more expensive properties, and a larger share were building a multi-property view. More than a quarter of buyer sessions (27.1%) included more than one property, compared with 6.9% of owner sessions.

Around one in five sessions (20.7%) modelled the property as an investment rather than a home. Those sessions involved lower-priced properties (median $700,000) and more leverage: 17.9% had a loan above 80% of value, compared with 8.4% of owner-occupied sessions. Median equity was $284,426 for investment properties and $400,000 for owner-occupied.

October is the second report in the Akweno Australian Property Investor Research series. As more months are added, we will be able to examine which of these patterns persist and which are month-to-month noise.

This report analyses anonymised October 2026 activity from users of Akweno's Australian Rental Yield Calculator and Equity Forecast Calculator.

The objective is to measure genuine property investment research behaviour rather than every interaction with the calculators.

Before analysis, the data was cleaned to:

• include Australian activity only
• exclude users who selected “Just learning” and sessions with no stated purpose
• include only sessions from people considering a purchase or checking a property they own
• remove obvious testing, incomplete or play-around inputs
• remove statistically implausible observations

For the yield analysis, observations with a gross rental yield below 1% or above 15%, or a property value outside $100,000 to $50 million, were excluded, leaving 141 sessions.

For the equity analysis, sessions with a property value outside $100,000 to $50 million, a loan below $10,000 or a loan greater than the property value were excluded, leaving 135 sessions. Equity is calculated as property value less loan amount.

The location analysis separately required a suburb to be recorded and matched to a single state, which is a stricter condition than the yield analysis. Where a suburb name exists in several states, the median rent and sale price recorded in the session were used to choose the correct one; sessions that could not be matched were excluded from the location analysis only, leaving 52 sessions.

All published results are aggregated. The report does not identify individual users or individual properties.

Akweno Australian Property Investor Research is a monthly series examining anonymised property-investment research activity.

Rather than asking investors what they might do, we analyse what investors are actively researching — including locations, rental yields and other investment characteristics.

As the dataset develops, future reports will track how these behaviours change over time.