Remember that nice discarded box you walked past on your way home from work the other night? It might be time to start sizing it up for a mattress, because apparently that’s your best bet at homeownership in major metro areas right now.
Sydney‘s housing prices are a well documented nightmare, but Melbourne‘s having a fair crack at keeping up. In terms of median pricing if Sydney were the Death Egg, Melbourne would be the annoying, shitty Mecha Sonic you’ve gotta dispatch first before you take on Dr. Robotnik one-on-one.
The Melbourne housing market is currently suffering from a particularly brutal combination of an overflow of potential buyers and a shortage of houses for sale. What that equates to is a median housing price in the Victorian capital that just hit an all-time record high of $826,000.
Worse still, that median price has shot up a whopping $55,000 since December alone. That means in the first quarter of 2017, the median housing price jumped 7.6%. SEVEN POINT SIX.
In individual suburbs, the jump was a lot higher. The median price in Templestowe, for example, spiked by a whopping 17.6% since the start of the year, now resting at a lazy $1.552million.
In the “more affordable” suburbs the rate of growth was similarly sharp. Cranbourne North saw a three-month increase of 14.9%, from $451,000 in December to $518,000 in March.
The spike in prices comes from suburbs all across Melbourne, rather than being skewed by a concentrated increase in a select few popular or boom areas.
The most affordable areas of Melbourne to buy a home are all extraordinarily large distances away from the CBD, with Melton West, Wyndham Vale, Werribee, Sunbury, and Pakenham, all of which lie an average of about 43.6km away from the centre of the city.
Real Estate Institute of Victoria chief Joseph Walton asserted that the size of the price spike is extremely unusual for a single quarter in the area.
“Melbourne’s property market is experiencing a perfect storm. To see a 7.6 per cent rise in a quarter where property transactions are generally low is quite surprising.”
“We think one of the key growth drivers at the moment is strong buyer demand, which I guess is driven also by there being low supply to the market place.”“Given that’s expected to continue, price growth should continue to rise.”
Great. That is excellent.
It might be time to start thinking about packing it all in and buying a 2-man tent from a K-Mart instead.
Or one of those fancy 4-man tents with the annex if your parents can help you out.
Source: ABC News.
Photo: Glenn Hunt/Getty.
