Leo Edwards has read every Bass Coast house sale of the last ten years, and the picture is calmer than the headlines suggest. Inverloch, Cape Paterson and Wonthaggi did not crash, the panic that drove the last two years has eased, and good homes are still trading below their 2022 peak. Here is what the data actually shows across all three markets, and where the value sits today.

What the buyers at my opens worked out before the data did

The quiet years came first. From 2017 to 2020, Inverloch, Cape Paterson and Wonthaggi all compounded at high single to low double digit rates with healthy, liquid turnover. Inverloch was clearing more than two hundred sales a year. This was a functioning market that the rest of Victoria had not yet noticed.

Then came the repricing nobody could have modelled. Off the 2020 base, every one of the three suburbs added between fifty two and sixty per cent in two to three years. Inverloch ran from a $640,000 median to a round $1,000,000. Cape Paterson reached $930,000.

Wonthaggi went from $385,000 to $615,000. What is interesting is the timing. Cape Paterson and Wonthaggi peaked in 2022, but Inverloch peaked a full year later, in 2023. The premium end is always the last to peak, because scarcity carries momentum after the broader market has already turned. I watched it happen at the negotiating table.

The third chapter, the one everyone is still nervous about, is the part the data should actually calm you down about. The pull back from peak has been shallow and orderly. Wonthaggi is off roughly eleven per cent from its high, Inverloch around fifteen, Cape Paterson around eighteen.

Put against the genuinely overcooked sea change markets, that is mild. Byron Bay sits more than twenty per cent below its peak. No Bass Coast suburb has surrendered even half of what it gained. Inverloch today, at an $846,000 median, is still a third higher than it was in 2020. Wonthaggi, at $550,000, is more than forty per cent higher. The correction did not give back the lifestyle premium. It only shaved the froth.

The pattern that matters more than price

Here is the thing the median hides, and the thing I want every vendor and every buyer to understand before they make a decision this year. This was never a demand collapse. It was a liquidity squeeze.

Inverloch is transacting at roughly sixty per cent of its pre pandemic volume. Prices held firm largely because the people who did not have to sell simply took their homes off the market and waited.

Thin supply, not aggressive bidding, is what has been holding the floor. That has a very practical consequence. The moment buyer demand outpaces the trickle of listings, which is what falling interest rates tend to produce, the homes priced at today's levels may well look well bought in hindsight.

The current CoreLogic reads already show the turn beginning. Inverloch's annual decline has decelerated to under two per cent, and Wonthaggi has quietly moved back into positive growth.

The three towns are also not one market, and pretending they are is how people overpay or underbid. Inverloch has become a genuinely premium address. Homes at or above $900,000 made up around eighteen per cent of its sales in 2020.

They are now more than a third, and the sub $600,000 home has all but vanished from the suburb. Wonthaggi is the opposite and, right now, the most resilient of the three: it still has a real entry rung under $500,000, it carries the strongest rental yields, and it is the affordability valve for everyone priced out of the coast. Cape Paterson sits between them, but it is a tiny, tightly held market, and its headline annual numbers swing wildly on a handful of sales.

Read any single Cape Paterson year with a wide margin and read the scarcity instead.

Where that leaves the homes we have on the market today

If the data tells you the correction is over and the value sits in well bought stock before volume returns, then the obvious question is which homes. Here is how my current listings map onto each of those three markets.

Inverloch, the premium address, priced at the heart of the market

The cluster of Inverloch homes I am selling sits squarely in the $945,000 to $1,045,000 band, which is precisely where the suburb's market now lives. 10 Dalmont Bay Court is 286 square metres of two level coastal living with five bedrooms, an upper level kitchenette and ocean glimpses through the treetops, quoted at $995,000 to $1,045,000. It is built for the family that needs room to spread out or the couple who want the grandchildren to have their own wing.

1 Cassinia Street is the craftsman built seachange, four bedrooms and a serious workshop on 780 square metres, at $965,000 to $1,025,000, the kind of solid hardwood and high ceiling home that does not come up often.

And for the buyer who values address and finish over sheer size, 1/3 Victoria Street is an architecturally considered two bedroom beach house with dual entertaining decks and a detached studio on one of Inverloch's most respected streets, a two minute walk from the sand, at $945,000 to $995,000. Three different buyers, one suburb, all pricing into the band the data says is the new normal.

Cape Paterson, scarcity at both ends of the price ladder

Cape Paterson is the trophy and scarcity play, and the two homes I have listed there sit at opposite ends of the same tightly held village, which is exactly why the suburb's headline median jumps around so much from one year to the next.

19 Wheeler Road is the trophy. Three levels, five bedrooms, a glass observatory reached by a marine style spiral staircase, and protected ocean views to Wilsons Promontory that cannot be built out because the Bunurong Marine National Park and the coastal reserve sit between the house and the water. At $1,395,000 you are not only buying a view, you are buying the legal certainty of it.

At the other end, 68 Anglers Road is the rare affordable foothold, an immaculate north facing two bedroom single level home on 511 square metres with a genuinely scarce seven by six metre powered shed for the boat and the boards, at $635,000 to $675,000.

One suburb, a home at $1.395 million and a home in the $600,000s on the market at the same time. That is not a contradiction. That is what a thin, tightly held coastal market looks like, and it is why you read Cape Paterson by the scarcity, not by the average.

Wonthaggi, the value rung and the entry rung

Wonthaggi is where the data says the fundamentals are strongest, and my two listings there bracket the market neatly.

5 Kalamana Court is a craftsman built five bedroom home on 915 square metres in a tightly held court, with a butler's pantry, raised veggie beds and a working chicken coop, at $795,000 to $845,000, the top of the Wonthaggi market and the home families only leave when they are ready to downsize.

At the other end, 36 Hagelthorn Street is the suburb's vanishing species: a solid 1953 original offered for the first time in over seventy years, five bedrooms on a 667 square metre town block with rear laneway access, at $455,000 to $475,000. It needs work, and that is the point. It is one of the last genuine entry points into a Bass Coast town centre, the rung that has already disappeared from Inverloch.

Why I sell every one of these on Openn

Every home above is being sold through Openn, the transparent negotiation platform, because in a market where buyers have spent three years nervous about overpaying, the fastest way to a fair, confident result is to let qualified buyers compete in the open and watch the price find its own level.

That is the same dynamic that turned a 172 day stalled listing into a 27 day sale with seven offers earlier this year. Transparency does the work that pressure used to.



The froth has come out. The fundamentals have not. Nobody rings a bell at the bottom of a market, and with this year's federal budget changes still working through the system, no honest agent will tell you they can call it to the day. What the data does say is clear enough: the panic has eased, and the homes selling now are selling on fundamentals rather than fear.

Leo Edwards is the principal of Inverloch 3996 @realty and a licensed agent who has sold across Inverloch, Cape Paterson and Wonthaggi since making the seachange to the Bass Coast in 2014. Twice named RateMyAgent Agent of the Year for Inverloch See current listings and market data at inverlochatrealty.com.au or call 0472 523 445.