News
Melbourne property market update
In February this year the Melbourne Age newspaper led with the headline 'Melbourne Tops Nation in Growth: Biggest Population Surge since the 1980s'
In this report, it stated that the city's population was increasing by almost 1,000 a week. The article gave a pretty obvious explanation to the ever-increasing demand for properties in Melbourne and for the city's escalating property prices. Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, released in February, reported that Melbourne's population had increased by 49,000 in 2005/2006, or just under 1,000 per week, the most of any Australian state capital.
The shire of Melton in Melbourne ranked third in a list of fastest growing local government areas, after Perth and Capel in Western Australia, with a growth rate of 8.9 per cent. Scott Keck, managing director of Charter Keck Cramer Property Values, wrote in the Australian Financial Review in January that: "We see the markets generally as being fantastic over the next ten years, due entirely to population growth. He continued: "We're on the doorstep now of the strongest decade that we can image."
Commenting on the demand for property in Melbourne in The Sunday Herald Sun newspaper Adrian Jones, President of the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, noted that: "I've had guys in my office saying they've got 40 good buyers, but there are only 20 houses for sale in the whole suburb. That's a recipe for explosive prices. As long as we keep 1,000 people a week moving into this city, that will continue."
Of course, increased demand for property has an almost guaranteed knock-on effect: the increase of property prices. Australian Property Monitors (APM) recently announced that this year's June quarter property market results were the best since the September quarter in 2001, with house prices growing by 6.5 per cent and unit prices by 4.1 per cent. APM also reported that Melbourne's prestige markets had experienced over double digit growth.
Other studies supporting APM's optimistic outlook for Melbourne and the rest of Victoria include those conducted by the Victorian Valuer General, showing that the state's house prices have increased by an average of 15 per cent a year over the last decade.
The Real Estate Institute of Victoria's figures from the June quarter also showed an increase of 10.2 per cent in Melbourne's median house price to AUS$420,000.
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15 October 2007