reasury officials say the property market is down everywhere in New South Wales, and that means falling stamp duty from house and unit sales.
Making a difficult situation even worse is that previously resilient parts of the top end of the market are no longer immune from the downturn.
A director at Ray White Real Estate Agents in Sydney, Kingsley Yates, says a fall-off in sales is costing the State Government.
"They're paying around $200,000 plus per transaction, some of these transactions last year, they were paying close to $1 million in stamp duty," he said.
Mr Yates believes it is time the State Government weaned itself from its dependence on property taxes.
"Stamp duty has always been an issue in real estate, and now that there is a rental crisis in Sydney and the investors have been keen with stamp duty, with land tax, and the Government, they want to encourage investors to buy real estate but they make it so difficult.
"So now we've got this Catch 22 where the housing affordability in Sydney is at a crisis point, the rental situation is at a crisis point, but they admit now that they rely so heavily on stamp duty.
"So I just don't know what they are going to do, I mean, they really rely so heavily on it, there must be other avenues that they should be looking at."