The surge in regional house prices has seen values in a number of locations double in just over a year.
According to PropTrack, Boat Harbour in New South Wales’ Hunter region saw the speediest growth nationally, with median house prices jumping 102 per cent to $1,707,500 in the 16 months to May.
Proston, a rural town in the South Burnett Region of Queensland, saw house prices double in 20 months, from $117,500 to $235,000.
Humpty Doo, a small town in Australia’s Northern Territory, situated just south of the Arnhem Highway, about 40km from Darwin, also saw house prices double in 20 months from $300,000 to $600,000.
While Nirimba Fields in north-west Sydney also saw house prices double in 20 months from $541,000 to $1,130,100.
PropTrack Director Economic Research, Cameron Kusher said the majority of the markets that saw prices double in value were in regional areas.
“A lot of the growth was driven by what happened during the pandemic,” Mr Kusher said.
“It doesn’t take a lot more demand to push up prices significantly and we certainly saw that in some of these markets where prices have doubled over the last two or three years.
Mr Kusher said much of the demand in these regional areas has been driven by people outside the area.
“I would say in most instances, these prices are being pushed up by either more investors buying in these markets or people that have jobs in Sydney, Melbourne, or major capital cities, that can do jobs remotely,” he said.
“The other one would obviously be people may be retiring early, selling out of a market like Sydney and Melbourne, where prices are significantly higher.
“And even though in some of these areas prices are quite high, they’re cheap relative to where they are coming out of in those major capital cities.”
Mr Kusher said he doesn’t expect this level of growth to continue in the near future.
“We are not going to see that sort of growth repeated anytime soon,” he said.
“We can already see prices starting to rise again, but it’s very much being driven by the capital city areas and particularly, capital city areas close to the city centre.
“These kinds of trends that we’ve seen over the past couple of years aren’t likely to be replicated anytime soon unless they have another pandemic and cut interest rates to basically nothing again.”
According to Mr Kusher, there is always going to be a large difference between housing markets.
He said locations like Hobart had seen their prices double in around seven years
While Perth has taken nearly 20 years for the same amount of growth in values.
“People used to say house prices double every seven years,” he said.
“Tasmania has been the only market where that’s been close to that.
“A lot of markets are looking at 15-20 years for house prices to double.”
