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Property in Melbourne's inner bayside suburbs is worth more per square metre than the city's most famous blue-ribbon suburbs like Toorak and Armadale, according to the Real Estate Institute of Victoria (REIV). REIV data has revealed buyers paid more for space in Albert Park than any other suburb across metropolitan Melbourne, at $12,947 per square metre. It was followed by the nearby suburbs of Middle Park and South Melbourne. Leafy Albert Park is home to the Australian Grand Prix and is near popular nightspots St Kilda, South Yarra and Prahran. Despite having Melbourne's highest median...

Apartment buyers in more than 87 suburbs across Australia – including swaths of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – could face tougher hurdles to get a mortgage as one lender tightens its loan criteria. And experts say more could do the same. In a note sent to brokers at the end of July, Citi pointed out 34 Sydney postcodes, 27 in Melbourne and 12 in Queensland where borrowers would have to jump through additional deposit hoops and face more stringent practices around cash out loans. A further eight suburbs in Perth, five in Canberra and one in South Australia were also on the list, a...

A BIRD’S EYE view of Melbourne’s boom suburbs show just how quickly they’ve changed in the last five years. Wyndham in Melbourne’s west, Casey in the south east, Whittlesea in the outer north and Melbourne’s CBD dominate the list of the top 10 fastest growing regions in Australia. Nearmap, an aerial imagery company, used Bureau of Statistics data to create a visual aerial transformation of suburbs that experienced the highest percentage of population growth between 2011 and 2016. University of Melbourne research fellow Dr Matthew Palm said there were many reasons why people flocked to the...

Prestige homes in Melbourne’s most sought-after locations attracted spirited competition at auctions on the weekend but the city-wide auction clearance rate pulled back. Among the sale highlights on Saturday was a Brighton property that soared $600,000 over reserve to $3.1 million, an Armadale house which sold for just shy of $6 million and an imposing Victorian residence in Elsternwick. It was scooped up by a young family at an auction attended by more than 200 onlookers.  But the solid bidder depth seen for $3 million-plus homes wasn’t always matched by highly inflated prices. Added to...

Ten years ago, there were only five Melbourne suburbs that had a median house price of $1 million. Now there are 121, which have enveloped most of the inner city, Domain Group data shows. This map shows how much of Melbourne is now taken up by suburbs with this hefty asking price.  As of June this year, more than 100 suburbs formed a solid bloc that expands out from the inner city, stretching as far north as Rosanna and as far south as Beaumaris. Abbotsford, Burnley, Brunswick, Clayton, Collingwood, Highett and Glen Huntly are among the areas that have turned red in the past year. But if...

Australians under 40 are being locked out of home ownership - a dynamic that is driving inequality, writes Rob Burgess. There can be no doubt about the link between this week’s dreadful home ownership and household income data, and growing inequality in Australia. To see that link clearly, however, it’s necessary to go back to earlier versions of the same report. That’s because the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, released on Wednesday, only takes a full snapshot of household wealth every four years. The latest full study of household wealth showed big...

Don’t miss out, CLICK HERE to get up to date video education from Konrad Bobilak. Here is what you will learn by watching this video; The key to becoming a successful property investor is to become an expert in ‘Finance’, and obviously the ability to conduct ‘unbiased property and market due-diligence’, (which will most likely be the topic of my next book)…but it’s your knowledge of finance and ability to understand who to correctly access and structure finance that will ultimately determine you net wealth long term, not your ability to master property selection. I know that I sound like...

It is 30 years since Paul Keating famously said that if you walked into any pet shop in Australia "the resident galah will be talking about microeconomic policy". There's a good chance those pet shop conversations have now turned to inequality. During the past week the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, Treasurer Scott Morrison, and even Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe have all weighed in on the topic. There are different perspectives on what's happened to income inequality recently. But the trend in wealth inequality is fairly clear. Governor Lowe says it has become "more pronounced" over...

Property punters with a sub-$500,000 budget would do well to zero in on such Melbourne suburbs as Cranbourne West, Cranbourne East and Clyde North, new data suggests. All have affordable housing options and a $500,000 budget can easily secure a recently constructed four-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a double lock-up garage on a 500-square-metre block. There’s a catch, of course. These areas are 40 to 50 kilometres south east of the CBD, a big commute by anyone’s standards. But according to a report on how to best spend “a lazy half-million” by valuers Herron Todd White, buying in the...

For buyers searching for a home in Australia’s mining towns, it is as though the nation’s unprecedented mining boom never happened. Median prices in key mining centres in Queensland and Western Australia have fallen to below the average price of more than a decade ago, wiping out the capital gains of the iron ore and coal-fuelled boom. In central Queensland’s Mackay — a hub for the coal-rich Bowen Basin — the $330,000 median house price is cheaper than the 2006 price of $338,000, according to figures supplied to The Australian by researcher CoreLogic. Across the nation in Port Hedland,...