What changed in property marketing, and when it changed.
Property marketing changed in three places at once between 2020 and 2026: the price of money, the way people pay attention, and the surface they search on. This note is the era piece behind the three forces: a dated account of what moved and when, because a firm cannot respond to something it cannot place in time.
The price of money moved twice
The Reserve Bank of Australia held the cash rate target at 0.10 per cent from 4 November 2020 until 4 May 2022, then lifted it at thirteen of the next eighteen meetings, reaching 4.35 per cent on 8 November 2023. A marketing plan written in 2021 was written for a buyer who could borrow more than the same buyer could borrow two years later.
After the rises, the Board cut the cash rate target three times between February and August 2025, to 3.60 per cent, and then lifted it again in 2026. The point is not the level. The point is that the cost of the decision a buyer is being asked to make has changed direction three times in five years, and every change resets the arithmetic behind the offer.
Marketing written for the 2021 buyer assumed urgency was the constraint. Marketing that works for the 2026 buyer assumes justification is the constraint. Those need different pages.
Attention moved onto one device
Mobile phone use to go online reached 97 per cent of Australian adults in 2025, a 22 percentage point increase on 2017. That is the whole audience, on a screen held at arm’s length, mostly alone.
The other end of the same shift is easy to miss. Only 12 per cent of Australian adults used a landline phone in 2025, down from 15 per cent in 2024 and 54 per cent in 2017. A sales process built on a buyer ringing a listed number is built on a channel only 12 per cent of adults used at all in 2025.
Neither number says advertising stopped working. They say the place the buyer does the private part of the work moved, and the place the seller waits for contact did not move with it.
The ground under the buyer moved
The number of years needed to save a home deposit rose from 9.0 in 2015 to 11.2 in 2025. A deposit that takes eleven years to save is not accumulated on impulse, and the purchase it funds is not won with urgency.
The share of renter households in rental stress rose from 24.9 per cent in 2014 to a record 29.5 per cent in 2024. The buyer arriving at an enquiry form in 2026 has spent longer getting there, under more pressure, and has more reason to check before committing.
That is the behavioural change underneath the economic one, and it is why proof beats persuasion at this end of the market. The full picture is in evolving buyer behaviour and how property buyers research now.
The search surface changed last, and quietly
The third change arrived without a date most firms noticed. Google’s Search Central documentation now carries a page on AI features and your website, last updated on 10 December 2025, setting out how AI Overviews and AI Mode work from a site owner’s point of view.
A search result that answers in prose, with a handful of supporting links, changes what a first page visit is worth and what it takes to be one of the links. It does not change what a good page is made of, which is the useful half of the news.
What the documentation actually asks for, quoted rather than characterised, is in the shifting digital landscape and where buyers look now.
The three changes on one timeline
Set side by side, the sequence explains why so many plans answered only the first of the three. The money moved first and loudly. The other two moved slowly, and neither had a press conference.
| When | What moved | How it was reported |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 2020 to May 2022 | Cash rate target held at 0.10 per cent | On the day, every meeting |
| May 2022 to Nov 2023 | Thirteen rises to 4.35 per cent | On the day, every meeting |
| 2017 to 2025 | Mobile internet use to 97 per cent, landline use to 12 per cent | Once a year, in a regulator’s research report |
| 2015 to 2025 | Years to save a deposit from 9.0 to 11.2 | Once a year, in an annual housing report |
| To Dec 2025 | Documented guidance on AI features in Search | A documentation page, updated without notice |
Three of the five rows above are only visible to somebody who goes looking once a year. That is the practical reason a firm can be diligent about the market and still be two years late to the change that matters most to it.
What the cheap-money years taught, and why it does not transfer
Between late 2020 and early 2022 a great deal of marketing worked that should not have. Demand was ahead of supply, money was close to free, and a campaign that did little more than announce availability could fill a release. The lesson many firms took from it was that their marketing was good.
The test of that lesson came when the rate rose thirteen times in eighteen months. Work that had been carried by conditions stopped producing, and work that had been building an audience kept producing at a lower rate. The difference between the two was invisible while the conditions held.
This is the honest reason to read the three forces rather than the last campaign report. A result in a strong market tells a firm very little about its marketing, and a result in a difficult one tells it almost everything.
What it cost the firms that did not notice
The cost does not show up as a collapse. It shows up as the same spend producing enquiries that convert less often, and a sales team that describes the leads as worse without being able to say why.
The mechanism is ordinary. A longer, more private research stage means more of the decision happens before contact. If nothing a firm published took part in that stage, the enquiry arrives at the end of a process the firm had no part in, against competitors who were present in it. The lead is not worse. The firm arrived later.
The diagnosis is worth doing carefully rather than assuming, and the method for it is on demand generation, which is the practice that works before an enquiry exists.
What to do with the dates
Three uses. First, stop attributing a 2026 result to a 2021 benchmark: the buyer, the borrowing capacity and the search page are all different, so the comparison measures the era rather than the work.
Second, check which of the three changes a plan has actually answered. Most plans have answered the first, by repricing, and neither of the others.
Third, read the forces themselves rather than the summary. Start with the macroeconomic environment a property marketer works in, then take the order of work from responding to changing market conditions. The thesis holding the set together is trust-led marketing for an evolving era.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
Each source below was fetched and read on 19 September 2026. Every figure in the text carries the source’s own as-at date in the sentence it appears in. Nothing here was bought, and no figure on this page comes from a client’s data.
| Source | Publisher | Published |
|---|---|---|
| Cash Rate Target | Reserve Bank of Australia | To the meeting of 12 Aug 2026 |
| Communications and media in Australia: How we use the internet | Australian Communications and Media Authority | February 2026 |
| Mobile phone internet use soars as landline use keeps falling | Australian Communications and Media Authority | 19 Feb 2026 |
| State of the Housing System 2026 | National Housing Supply and Affordability Council | 30 Apr 2026 |
| AI features and your website, Search Central documentation | Last updated 10 Dec 2025 |
Get in touchDavid Collins writes the Field Notes. To put this note against your own numbers, get in touch.
This note sits in the Field Notes, under trust-led marketing. The market it is written for is property development marketing.