A simple example seems to work correctly, so I suspect it's something else... are you using a component with the v-if as well?

Here is a demo: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/abJys

Oh ok, thought you are referring to a property instead of $data. Yeah the caveat here is that v-if creates an anonymous wrapper instance around its content, it inherits all normal properties but its $data is an empty object. I'll probably rework that part later since the anonymous instance isn't ideal anyway.