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Commercial property is not as standardised as residential property where there can be dozens of sales of homes in any given suburb any given month. In such instances it is reasonable to take a median value of 3 bedroom home sales (as an example), and use that to plot trends over time. 

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But with commercial property this is much harder to do as there are far fewer sales, and there is no standard 'commercial property'. Many property firms do attempt to develop their own price trends for various sectors (e.g. office, retail, industrial) and we use these frequently in our research for assessing trends over time, but there is no common published index agreed by the industry.

For our own research we are always looking at examples where we can see the same property sold multiple times through history to better understand trends. In our research we recently came across the property at 8 St Georges terrace Perth which has been sold multiple times across its history and we thought it useful to show these price trends as an example of the Perth office market. The property itself is a B grade 8 storey office building with floor plates of ~ 600m². We understand that it was sold in 2019 requiring refurbishment which has largely been completed now.

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The chart below plots the price trends over time in both absolute values and on a square metre basis. The peak sales price was $27.3M in 2007 (sales rate of $6,161/m²) and it was most recently sold in 2019 for $10.20M (sales rate of $2,300/m²). This represents a fall of 63% over that time period and arguably the peak would have occurred sometime between 2007 and 2014, which would have given an even larger % fall.