Suburb Trends March 2021 | Areas with big price falls!

What are the suburbs and regions that have a grim outlook?
This month we are focusing on what’s not booming, which suburbs and areas have had the greatest price falls, and why? We recap on how the property market is currently performing, why some suburbs have had the greatest drop off and what it means for greater Australia.

Here’s what we covered:

• How is the unit market performing?

• Where is the last place you should buy property?

• How Western Sydney compares to the city.

• What patterns and potential causes have impacted these areas?

• How has the drop in tourism impacted property prices across Australia?

• Where was the biggest fall in property prices in Australia?

• Will these areas bounce back in the future or will the demand flow elsewhere?

RELEVANT EPISODES:
Episode 159 | Eliza Owen
Suburb Trends February 2021
Suburb Trends December 2020

LINKS:
www.suburbtrends.com
https://www.suburbtrends.com/suburb-reviews
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/suburbs-house-price-plummeting-011158856.html?guccounter=1

HOST LINKS:
Looking for a Sydney Buyers Agent? www.gooddeeds.com.au
Work with Veronica: https://linktr.ee/veronicamorgan

Looking for a Mortgage Broker? www.wealthful.com.au
Work with Chris: hello@wealthful.com.au

 Send in your questions to: questions@theelephantintheroom.com.au

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Please note that this has been transcribed by half-human-half-robot, so brace yourself for typos and the odd bit of weirdness…
This episode was recorded in March, 2021.

Veronica Morgan: This is our suburb trends report for March, 2021. And we'll be looking at where prices are moving across the country and why they're moving in this episode, we'll be discussing the anomalies, the outliers. What's not booming in a time when it seems prices are on the rise everywhere you look

Veronica Morgan: Welcome to the elephant in the room. This is the podcast where we love to talk about the big things in property that never usually get talked about. I'm Veronica Morgan, real estate agent buyer's agent co-host of Foxtel's location, location, location, Australia, and author of auction ready.

Chris Bates: And I'm Chris Bates mortgage broker,

Kent Lardner: And I'm the data game. Kent Lardner.

Chris Bates: Before we get started, I need to let you know that nothing we say on air can be taken as personal advice. We always recommend you engage the services of a professional.

Veronica Morgan: Don't forget that you can access the transcript for this episode on the website, as well as download our free full forecast report, which experts can you trust to get it right? The elephant in the room.com did I use

Veronica Morgan: This month's focus is on the suburbs where prices are not rising, what the data is telling us and where it might be misleading us. Our reference point here isn't data from real estate.com that I, you, that lists the 10 suburbs with the largest median price falls in the 12 months to January 21. And we will include a link in the show notes to the article we're referring to, but Kent, before we sort of our, as we kick off, I should say, what what are we going to do with this data? How are we going to evaluate it?

Kent Lardner: Yeah, well, we're going to go through it and take a fairly critical view of this singular metric, which is the median at a suburb level. And obviously it does carry some risks. These guys you know, real estate.com that you do a great job with most of the things they do. But when it comes to a, a median analysis, even though the suburbs do have more than 100 sales so they're statistically significant by some measures. When you dig deep, we are going to find quite a few anomalies and we're going to actually call out that some of these suburbs don't deserve to be on the black list.

Veronica Morgan: Now I'll just get a run through the list first. So everyone sort of gets an understanding of what we're going to be talking about, and then we can, we can start sort of digging into it. So at the topping, topping the list, number one, black spot, according to REA Cairns North units and with a percentage change to median of negative 12% next is Orban new South Wales. So that's a Sydney suburb, our Western Sydney suburb units also minus 12 Redfern, which is an inner Sydney suburb units minus 10 burping Gary East. And I do apologize if I have pronounced that incorrectly. That is in Queensland. That is a suburb Morton Bay area, just North of Brisbane that's houses minus 9% Tareq. I think we've all heard of two rec Victoria very wealthy prestigious Milton suburb units, minus 9% Carlton and other inner city suburb of Melbourne. Sort of somewhat comparable to Redfern minus 8% Dell Gallup. Is that how you say it? Wi house minus 8%. That's done in Bunbury, Newport Queensland. That's also a Morton Bay area minus 7% houses, Paramatta new South Wales units, minus 7%. That's out of Sydney, Western Sydney, and number 10 Fremantle, which is the South that Perth South of it's in-person, you'll actually Fremantle with houses minus 7%. So that's, that's what the list is. Let's go to the ones that don't belong there. Shall we start with them?

Kent Lardner: Yeah, well, we'll go through them one by one and I'll quickly go through Cairns North. I think Karen Snow does deserve to be there. What I like to do is zoom out a little bit and go out to the [inaudible] region, which is my common go-to. And the, the, the region for Cannes South has dropped by 20% compared to the same period 12 months ago. And that's using a slightly different sampling methodology where I take a rolling three months sample because you can, when it comes to and they say three region. So yes, that's gone down. Days on market is just a, another thing that we like to check and we say, okay, does that agree as well? That's trending down ever so slightly in the last three or four months, but if you compare it to where it was a year ago, yes. How many? Yeah, look, I think it's about 60 at the moment. It's over a hundred days. So yeah. So it's a hundred days. I think it was down to down below the a hundred Dima when we zoom back about 12 months ago, it was

Veronica Morgan: Three months to sell a property, a unit.

Kent Lardner: Yeah. So, so, so interesting data they make market conditions is my go-to though. As we often talk about, and, you know, it's currently sitting up around that eight month Mark, and that's been trending down a little bit in the last few months. So in short, I would say Cairns North. Yep. You deserve to be on that list. I mean, these are pretty cheap and cheerful apartments, right there only a couple hundred grand. Is that sort of the media? It's true. So yeah, if you look at some of those prices, I'll just, I'll go through my charts and also just have a quick look at the listing volumes on days on market. Let me just double check the days on market. Let me rephrase that. 64, it came off. So it was 107. It's actually come down a little bit, but we're still processing some data. So last month it was 102. So there we go. So I might, I guess, cans, if you're living in cans, you've got a family

Chris Bates: Oh, you're a couple houses, you know probably not that unaffordable, let's say. So then I've got to buy these units. I imagine a lot of these are people who have gone on holidays to Cannes and bought an investment property up there and thought they might come back and use the lot more. Do you think that be a lot of investors that own those apartments and no, one's buying those apartments because no, one's going on holidays up there. So lots of people,

Kent Lardner: I know people who've done the same thing. And I remember back to the pilot strike, you know, that's really showing my age, but yeah, cancer cancer was impacted substantially during that pilot strike. So what, for those same reasons today, it's been amazing.

Veronica Morgan: It is interesting, isn't it? And you know, it's funny, you look at a map of, of Queensland and the distance from Brisbane to Cairns. I mean, you know, there are those people that they say that North Queensland should be a separate state and you can understand it. It's a long way. And you know, if there's no other reason to go there other than the go on holidays and obviously there's mining and there's some industry up there, but it, you know, it's, it is a long way to go for a holiday. And if you can't fly there, you're not going to go there. Let's face it.

Chris Bates: I get what you're saying there. Cause it's not say the sunshine coast where you potentially, you know, if you go to Brisbane, you can easily live in Brisbane. You can easily go to the sunshine coast, but if you live in Brisbane, you're not going to cancel it. It's like going on an overseas holiday, you know, it's quite a long flight sort of thing, and you can't drive there sort of thing. So it is only a very one dimensional sort of market where it's not got a capital city that it's kind of piggybacking off like central coast.

Kent Lardner: Is it hard to work from home a bit hard to work from home and commute down to Brisbane?

Veronica Morgan: Yeah, it's a bit outside that range. Okay. So the next one, the list is Orban units. So this is Western Sydney units.

Kent Lardner: Yeah. So an interesting anomaly when you track and measure the asking price or listing price, and you look at that through time, sometimes they can, it can split out and act a little bit differently than sale price. And one of my theories there is that people are cherry picking the lower price properties in many markets. So effectively thing up there, if the asking price average has stayed fairly consistent over the last 12 months, but the sale price is going down. That's often the result of people, cherry picking the low price stuff to buy. So, so that's, I think Albany is one of those examples now you know, a year ago it was the typical asking price about 568,000 today, give or take about 550. So yes, that's gone down when I zoom out to that essay three region, which is also called Orban that's been fairly flat.

Kent Lardner: So the sale prices there have been pretty much 0% change. So based on the suburb data, I would agree that it deserves to be there, but I, again, you know, calling it out as a, a major drop or a 12% drop in your might be a little bit hard going.

Chris Bates: I think that sort under 650 market in new South Wales was getting supported by the stamp duty exemption that was on established as well as new. And so a lot of first-time buyers, you know, say 20, 20, 20, 19 sort of time we're buying units, but I'm one of those first-time buyers who were getting that standard exemption and probably shifted their plans in 2020 and went away from units and thought maybe central coast or houses, et cetera. So do you think that's kind of played into it a little bit? Can't where maybe they got a good run the year before, and then maybe that sort of paid it off.

Kent Lardner: I think the narrative with apartments has changed a lot in the last 12 months. So I think we're all seeing that. And you know, there, there were always some odd stories or bad stories about construction issues. I think that probably was the first thing where we'll worry about all of these defects, but now it's turned on onto, is it a, is it a wise investment? And that narrative is very strong. I, you know, I look at some of these user groups on Facebook and whatnot, and they all seem to be singing from the same hymnbook when it comes to talking about apartment.

Veronica Morgan: Interesting. Cause I'm just looking at the air map at the moment, which is one of your favorite pastimes, isn't it, Chris and I can't see a huge amount of new roofs, you know, like, I mean, that's sort of how you look for, you know, there's, there's a lot of houses there there's there's units around the station, which is typical. You know, and beyond that, I'm not seeing massive development in the same way you will in a lot of other areas. And I think what you're saying there, can't about that, you know, that's such an interesting distinction between sale price and asking price. And you know, you've always talked about compositional bias when it comes to media and you know, the median as a, as a, as a measure in a year, if there's all the cheaper properties selling is going to look like prices are falling. But if you're in that cheaper price bracket and you're trying to compete for something, that's got a cap on it because everyone's trying to stay under a, under a threshold to get a benefit, then that's going to be highly competitive and, and there's going to be price rises within a segment of the market. So I think that's a really interesting distinction.

Kent Lardner: Mm well, we got some doozies when we're talking about compositional bias and prostate distribution. We will, some of our suburbs here are going to really stand out, but in terms of Orban price distribution, the most common bracket, 400 to 600, and it's a very normal distribution. So,

Veronica Morgan: And I know you're about to walk into a very abnormal distribution now, aren't you

Kent Lardner: A great segue into Redfern now, now this was interesting. So I couldn't make sense of it because yeah, it was calling out a fairly significant drop, but it didn't really agree with the inventory. So, you know, it was down below the three Mark, which is always a fairly strong market and I dug a bit deeper. And when I looked at what was selling in Redfern about a year ago, there was a lot of very expensive, large luxurious apartments selling for some reason, for whatever reason this time a year ago. And those same profile or price bracket properties are not selling or haven't been selling in more recent months. So that seemed to be the root cause of it entering this nasty black list.

Chris Bates: So interesting. Right. So the media got pushed up because there was more expensive sales this year, not as many expensive sales, medium stroked has the market drop for expensive apartments. Maybe not. It's just mean they haven't sold as, as yeah.

Veronica Morgan: And that's true. I've, I'm looking for one at the moment for client and it's really very, very scarce. And that is, you know, years ago when I was selling real estate in Balmain and I'd have that argument with buyers around the fact that you got worker's cottages right up to waterfront homes and the same sort of thing happens there, you get a few waterfronts sell. The median goes up, you have, if you will, a couple of when none sells and the meeting goes down and people say, Oh, Boeing prices are falling. It's like, no, they're not. But yeah, Redfern is an interesting one too, because there are, you know, there are a lot of units and, you know, there are certain parts of Redfin where there's quite a lot of units and there is some more development coming, but it's still pretty landlocked, you know? And then, well, he's very landlocked, but there's only, there's only a limited there's limited land to actually redevelop into units.

Kent Lardner: Yeah. It'll be interesting though, post jab, what might happen to places like Redfern, if it's affordable. And I think the demographics are going to change, you know, people kind of migrate out of the cities and then come back again, who comes back and how much money they got just going to be really interesting

Chris Bates: Redfern per se, landlock. Cause you've got, you know, heritage houses on the sort of new town side. And then you've got sort of sari Hills which is sort of heritage houses as well on that side. But once you go South, you go into sorta more Waterloo Alexandria and that area there is going to go through a massive sort of transformation, right? I mean, exactly. And there's a whole Metro station going in there. You know, you just have to search water Lewis state and there's big five towers. There's a huge argument going on, on what's happening there. So I think, yeah. Read from per se, but if you just go a little bit further South, I think there's a lot

Veronica Morgan: Choose what a board is onto and Alexandria is having that problem. Now, Alexandria is a huge suburb. And you've got the established part, which has got some lovely streets and mixer houses and apartments, and really well and thoughtfully developed as well, you know, all similar level. And, and then you've got over the sort of the next part of it, which is enormous and it's all being redeveloped industrial land. And is it, and it's fortunate for the established part of Alexandria because is now being tarred with the same brush as everything else, but it's a completely different kettle of fish. So yeah. Anyway,

Kent Lardner: So a bit, I think it's a bit tough on red food.

Veronica Morgan: Agreed. Agreed. Okay. Burpengary East and I had to get out the map to see where this was is

Kent Lardner: Yes. The essay three region of Caboolture in that particular region, the house price median has jumped up by plus

Veronica Morgan: Because I just wanted to say this actually bourbon Gary East is on the list for houses, not units. This is the first era for houses. Just, just pulling that distinction out.

Kent Lardner: Yeah. So it's it's the market conditions is probably the thing that I was go to first then yes, they are up around that close to that nine month Mark and have been for some time and you go back and it's remained fairly flat up, up around that nine or 10 month Mark. So you know, massive volumes of listings a couple of years ago. So there's, you know, you'd be ahead 110 old properties for sale on average couple of years ago. And it's still been fairly significant opera IDO 90 properties for sale on average. So it's just one of those things, lots and lots of supply, but it's a, it's a different market. When you look at some of the properties for sale, there's massive difference between property solves and lots of those retirement stall houses or, or you know, caravan park type housing that appeals to retirees as well that get listed as houses, which is really odd.

Kent Lardner: I'm looking at this as well. You know, can't, and you've got on the North side of the suburb, you've got new house on land packages that are probably 300 squares, 400 squares at best. And also the SAS side you know, the little pocket, and this is what the satellite, which you were referring to before Veronica, it was just such a valuable tool to understand markets when you can't get on the road yourself. And even then you wouldn't really be able to understand it, but then you've got this beautiful area in the middle where you've got

Veronica Morgan: It

Kent Lardner: And yeah, great houses and good, you know, it looks like it's a great place a little. And so that's probably, you can easily say, you know, people in birth, Gary, Gary you know, in the middle and those bigger houses, do you think their house prices are falling? Probably not, but because you've got this new supply, you know, in the North and South, it's really nowhere near that as good houses. It's really affecting the figures and, you know, giving it a bad rap that

Veronica Morgan: Really stocked too. And this is, as I said, you know, you sort of got me into looking at satellites a bit, Chris, cause you get talking about it. But if you literally, if you get onto the map and have a look and you go to the Northern part of the suburb, as you say, and you can actually see these subdivisions where IRA can these little, these little blocks in the preview in the older section, you probably would have got three houses to a block. And on these, I'm looking at 20, 20 houses on a block. And also what is funny is it on those other ones, the established areas where the blocks are enormous and they've got every house pretty much has got a pool. You're looking at these ones. And so many of them, the roof is so large. There's no space for a pool. And you think no.

Kent Lardner: And I, I remember some of the biggest LMI claims we ever pay, always these really small blocks, you know, you can pay three or four claims in one street,

Veronica Morgan: It's heartbreaking. So this has burping Garrett, Gary East. But once again, like you say, if you look, there's a dis there's a distribution distribution of different types of property in that area. And so you do have to get in there and understand the breakdown of what it is that's actually selling and then translating into soap. So data, which is then affecting the median price.

Kent Lardner: Yeah. So I would say for bourbon, Gary East, the jury is out whether it got it. The next one on my list is Tourek units. Now this is a doozy because the one that look at here is the price segment chart. And it is a, it's almost, you could say this is four different distinct markets. So, you know, yes, you have a significant proportion of sales that exist below 1 million, but then you've got a distribution that runs all the way up above 3 million and, and it's just a fascinating suburb. So I really wouldn't would call this one out and say, I don't think it deserves to be on the list at all, because when you zoom out to the [inaudible] region of Stonnington West it's up 14%. So, you know, the region itself seems to be doing quite well. Well, the essay three area the market conditions for for units for Tourek below four months. So again, that would signify a fairly strong market, not crazy. Boom

Veronica Morgan: It's I know you're using sort of statistical you know, commonly accepted benchmarks. Whereas I look at, I got four months to sell a property, get real. That's a, that's a terrible market, you know, that's definitely a buyer's market. But yeah, I think I you know, quite often when you look at your distribution charts, so, so those segmentation graphs that you have in suburb trends, I actually it's on probably nerds, isn't it?

Kent Lardner: No, I've got, I've got them. I can, whenever I spin up our reviews that we're talking about today, I put them on the suburb print site and you can just click through each slide and they're interactive. So if anyone wants to eyeball the stuff that we're talking about, they're all on now.

Veronica Morgan: And the show notes, I that as, and I've said it many, many times, but so you look at sorry, Hills, and Tarek's probably the same. It's not a nice bell curve, you know, when, when you got that idea of a bell curve, so most buyers are going to be in the middle and then there's, it's going to sort of nice gradually tail out. So you got, you know, small amount of really low price properties as small amount of really high price properties. And then you have something like Toorak, or as I said, Sarah Hills, or in Darlinghurst in Sydney, you know, places where you've got some seriously expensive apartments and you've got seriously cheap ones at the same time, and you've got these, these disparate segments of the market that they don't fit in a lovely bell curve. Do they?

Chris Bates: And when you try and get one of those automated valuation models to give you a free price estimate in a market like that, that's always a lead indicator.

Veronica Morgan: Yeah, yes,

Chris Bates: Yeah. Low confidence.

Veronica Morgan: Yeah. I think this is apartments worth between 500,000 and 2 million and 7 million.

Chris Bates: I do wonder about, I mean, I was quite vocal on the short Wayne's podcast around my sort of, I'm not sure about the apartment market is going to bounce back as strong in Melbourne. And, and quality apartments in Melbourne are going to perform as good as quality houses and, you know, to acts one of those areas where you know, are a lot of buyers in Melbourne who potentially would have interact now thinking they want more space now willing to go a little bit further now what the housing market. And

Veronica Morgan: I always think about young families. And so what about downsizers who are, who are actually getting out of their big Toorak home and don't want to leave the area

Chris Bates: Got lots of options. They've, you know, there's lots of options for apartments, hence why there's full months and stuff on the market. There's, you know, there's not a shortage of like inherent, like under supply of apartments. They built a lot of apartments and a lot of them might even want new apartments. You know, in those areas, they want them more, the bigger sort of three beds. So probably that top price segment that he told me about, if you're interacting, you're leaving to rock, you want that sort of two plus probably apartment which isn't the 600,000 apartments where the first home buyers go. So that's the ones I'm worried about, the beautiful, big, older apartments that have got views that are, you know, prestige buildings impress these streets. Yeah, absolutely. They will always do really well because of that downsizer. But I just wonder about those sorts of the cheap and cheerful, small red blue box, I think too, calling out here that there's apartments and there's townhomes that then they all go get thrown in

Veronica Morgan: Philip I Villa Victoria has got a slightly different mix of apartments. It's got land content. Yeah.

Chris Bates: Now how about we talk about oversupply Colton units. If you look at what's for sale, there, there are an abundance of, so of the, a bed sitter style bitters.

Kent Lardner: So, so many students. So I think that might have something to do with students.

Veronica Morgan: Yep. Bang in the university of Melbourne. Yeah. So yes, a lot of property that's been built specifically with that market in mind. And this is when I guess the frailties of having only one type of buyer, one type of tenant is exposed really in this sort of market. Right.

Kent Lardner: So I think, I think with Colton, we can definitely say yes, all the other supporting indicators say deserves to be on the list. Probably the big thing to look at though is when you're suddenly got a an onslaught of a different style of property. So suddenly you go from one and two bedroom properties selling a year or two ago to the, the listings and sales being swamped by bedsits that does have an impact on price. However, when we look at the overall market, it is the market conditions are in, in a very significant oversupplied position.

Chris Bates: I think the thing with Carlton as well, it literally is bordering the CBD. So you could live in Carlton and walk to work in the city, no problems at all. So you almost that gets him painted by all the city sort of apartments. And Melvin's definitely going to in any city apartment, boom, not so much like Sydney, Sydney, sort of the apartments that do it in the city are usually very expensive. And they're sort of hitting that downsizer market we spoke about, but in Melbourne it was cheap and cheap for let's just get it up. There's no restrictions on building height, you know, within reason. And he said, there's a lot of apartments for residential that have been built in the city plus neighboring suburbs, Docklands, Carlton, et cetera.

Veronica Morgan: All right. Danielle up WA

Kent Lardner: Yes. Well, I struggled to pronounce this. I think you've done a really good job.

Veronica Morgan: I haven't offended anybody. I did look it up

Kent Lardner: How to pronounce it. It's actually, I think it's, I found it online how to pronounce

Veronica Morgan: That one the region

Kent Lardner: That it belongs to is Bunbury Bunbury. That's the ASA three region. Now that particular region has actually jumped up by 8% over the last four months. Again, that's using that 90 day rolling median. So it does look like it's done quite okay. The asking price three 65 K seems about where it was a year ago. So the last thing I then like to look at is, you know, what's the inventory level or market conditions and yeah, they're a little bit higher, but trending down. So if I kind of look back about a year ago, it was around eight or nine months of inventory, and now that's getting down just slightly below eight. So it's not boom conditions, but I wouldn't say it's crash conditions either. So it's a fairly stable and modestly improving market. Okay. Bombora is a long

Veronica Morgan: Way South of Perth, and this is all new ish subdivision. What, where are the people working that live?

Kent Lardner: I didn't look that up. I'm going to throw that to Chris and hope that Chris did that homework.

Veronica Morgan: Chris, is it mining? I'm guessing it's quite far, right. It's a long way.

Chris Bates: It's quite far. It's kind of almost down towards Margaret river sort of way. It's not as far, but yeah. It's, I mean, is it retirees sort of moving down there and, you know, trying to look at a lockup sort of thing? Yeah, it's it's a funny place, right? It's in the middle of, in the middle of two sort of areas

Kent Lardner: And most of the properties are selling below 400.

Veronica Morgan: They have very interesting street names and I just have to you know, so Eva, fair way, Harold way. They're the normal ones then you've got, hang on now I've lost. It kept the approach, eclipse bend. I don't even know how to say this taters link CPR approach. So anyway, look,

Kent Lardner: Obviously there's a theme

Veronica Morgan: Exactly. Right. and obviously we don't get who's living there. And so it sort of interests, there is a primary school, so it cannot be retirees. Yeah. Anyway, it's an interesting eighties miles away really. And even it's, it's a satellite suburb really of Bumbury as well. You know, there's quite a big gap between it and even the next sort of lot of suburbs. So it's

Kent Lardner: Kind of been a, a long-term sellers market. Yeah.

Chris Bates: Yeah. And I'd probably say there's probably two-stage market there as well. It's on the beach. So you've got things that are, you know, you wake up in the morning and get your coffee and just go for a walk along this really nice long beach. And then you've got maybe 500 meters to a sort of kilometer back where you may be too far from the beach. You're not getting that walking there. You know, before work, let's say and then you've got lots of supply coming

Kent Lardner: And I'll just say long-term, I've meant to say long-term buyers. Yeah.

Veronica Morgan: Oh, I was thinking that anyone who's selling isn't long-term because it's going to take a while.

Kent Lardner: Well, whatever, whatever. I just want to correct that, I don't know why that came out of my mouth. Do you want to, do you want to move on?

Veronica Morgan: So Newport back up into Queensland, back up into Morton Bay terrace.

Kent Lardner: So the the region, the [inaudible] region belongs to is green cliff. And that region has actually jumped up 10% in the last 12 months. So that's interesting. The asking prices, the listing prices for the four houses in Newport Queensland about 667,000 today versus 638,000 year ago. So what that tells me is that there's been some cherry picking of the lower price properties. Hence the reason why it's showing up as minus 7% on their list. But I would say that there's a bit of a, there's a challenge on here to say it may not be deserved to be on the list,

Chris Bates: Deserve it. This is an easy one. Can, I mean, you look at the thought of map. You've got that you know, anyone's been to sort of gold coast now with houses that are on the waterway on the canal is exactly you can have your jet ski and cruise around, or I know, I don't know what sort of people do on that canal anyway, in Newport. Yeah. Play with the. Yeah. So that's on the Western side and then on the Eastern side, sorry. And then on the Western side, Stockland nothing in Scotland, Stocklands a lot of debts, huge, nothing special about them. And it is just going house and land packages. So, you know, Newport is one of those suburbs. You're talking about Kent where it's just pointless to do because it's two markets, you've got canal life versus flat life near the canal. And it's just two different things. You can't compare apples and oranges.

Kent Lardner: Yeah. So market conditions have been improving in the last four or five months. So we're well above a year worth of inventory. And again, my measurements of inventory don't favor how saline areas. And I don't apologize for it. I just like to call it out, but it's kind of improved. So it's still high though. It's stuff around that 10 month box. So I would probably say yes, it, it, it, it, it should be in there, but you want to enter it into a list like this with lots of disclaimers, rather than going one dimensional.

Chris Bates: I personally just don't hate, hate seeing Newport in any listings, even if it's in a different state, because that's pretty much where I live. It's so beautiful. People don't want to get Newports wrapped up into anything bad. So I might write to REA to get rid of that change to the suburb name.

Veronica Morgan: It does show though how you do need to get into the nitty gritty to understand what's going on. And like, particularly with this Newport Queensland, not Newport new South Wales yes, you do have that canal area, which is established and you know, it's all built basically. And then you got to, to the Western side, as you see there, Chris, a whole, you know, a new subdivision, which given, I dunno when the satellite, as she's a satellite, always current, is that how it works or is it basically snapped? And then it gets repeated. It gets fixed.

Chris Bates: He can get really current ones, which is like near map, pretty pay the money for that, but you have to pay the big dollars. And there are obviously a lot of people are paying the big dogs cause their share price from memory was doing all right. But yeah, this Google map does do snapshots for you, but they are doing a very cool thing where it's 3d in say Sydney and other areas where you can not only see just from one dimension sort of above you can set goals and things like that. So not using it

Veronica Morgan: Satellite image for Newport and you can see right, well, in most places, if you've got a subdivision going next to an established area and the established areas been selling at X price, and there's nothing special about it, like, like being on the waterway, then when the subdivision cup gets released, typically the new properties get sold at a premium because they're new and it looks like the median is going up. But in this case, you've got the established areas on a canal, which would be selling at a premium compared to this new subdivision. And so when the new subdivision gets sold, it makes it look like the median is going down.

Kent Lardner: It's yes. It's, it's just, that's the problem with medians.

Veronica Morgan: Yeah. But also, as I said, get in there and understand what's going on in the market place. Okay. Next one, Paramatta units lock Toba back to oversupply. Is that what we're talking about here?

Kent Lardner: Yeah. I've been out to parameter a couple of times in the last couple of months and it's one very, very large construction zone. Lots of people with lolly.

Veronica Morgan: Do you know? I was actually watching something. What was it about, about the Parramatta river and the flood zone? Oh, I can't remember what the show was. It was actually quite interesting because these buildings have all been built to basically, you know, put in a 100 year flood. They could flood up to the first level or something. It's like, wow. And yet they're still building them, you know, it's that close to the river? Well, clearly they have to have a watertight lift. Is that possible? Anyway, I just was a little bit fascinated by that. There's a whole, you know, that the council's out educating people what to do. If there's a massive flood and everything I'm thinking, why are we still building, you know, big apartment buildings right next to the river? Anyway, that's just a side issue.

Chris Bates: Paramedic is such an interesting one because a few years ago we were getting people that the paramedic story was quite rife. Maybe say 2016, 2017 Sydney is getting too expensive. You need a second CBD, paramount as the answer et cetera. But when you look at it from the map, it's literally in the city single story sort of shops. So, you know, over time there's so much land available. So it was one tower was built. Another one gets built and they can even spread to the surrounding suburbs where there's already a lot of apartments, et cetera. So it's one of those things that, you know, as soon as prices go up, developers will start building again. And so then you get more supply and then you get flat lining your prices. So I imagine a similar things can happen in Paramatta CBD. We want to call it that to Melbourne CBD apartments, where you just get flat-lining of prices over 10, 15, 20 years. So you gotta be very careful buying apartments around Paramatta when there's just so much supply that is bound to come on. As soon as there's demand

Kent Lardner: The new light rail infrastructure is going in now, and you can see how it's going to link up to a lot of new dev sites out near the race course at Rose Hill, et cetera. So, you know, it was made just supplies go that's the supply opportunity for developers is going to be, and look, market conditions are deteriorating. So in terms of you know, my measurement of inventory eats consistently being increasing month on month over the last 12 months. So you it's it's, it's about the 10 month Mark, which is, you know yeah,

Chris Bates: A lot of people would have been burned here because the good low Val's you know, they would have purchased something at say what six 5,700 sort of, you know, the more expensive apartments new buildings got a low vow and then the price of the property hasn't risen and if not fall. And so a lot of first home buyers fell for the government incentives here. You also have investors and then they're stuck. They can't sell the apartment cause they're making a loss and they've lost everything. So

Kent Lardner: We leave paramedic.

Veronica Morgan: Yes. And number 10 drum roll

Kent Lardner: The last Fremantle I, you said Fremont, I try and say for me, isn't it. Okay. So all the indicators for me over the last four months say that market conditions have actually been improving. So yeah. Inventory levels look very healthy and have been trending in the right direction, listing volumes have been going down. So yeah, I think there's give or take 30 on average, you probably see about 30 properties for sale at the moment, but if you went back a year ago, you'd, you'd find over 50. And if you went back a couple of years ago, you'd probably get close to 60. So you know, things are looking okay there and, you know, asking prices or sorry, sale prices in the region. And the region is also called Fremantle have jumped up by 11%. So I'm going to jump to the conclusion that that one is unfairly listed.

Chris Bates: Makes sense though, right? Like not far over the bridge, she started getting into Cottesloe, which Dagley one of the best sub best suburbs in Perth. Prio is on just South of that. You know, it's got the beach, it's got everything. I mean, I think you're right. Can not, I look at that and go, how's that even possible? And then when you do zoom out and everything I'm hearing about Perth in the more premium end of Perth and the housing market, it's starting to go really strong. So that doesn't add up to me.

Kent Lardner: And when you read that, that the headline kind of it's, it's, it's a very click baity, you know, property prices are plummeting, lots of peas in it. But you know, I just think it's just not fair if you're a buyer's agent or a real estate agent or a value of trying to talk to somebody who's absorbing these headlines. It's just, yeah. I, there's a lot of reasons why I don't like these types of

Veronica Morgan: The may, the room where we are actually, Chris and I are currently writing the full forecast report for 2021. And that's where we really look all these sorts of things. These predictions, these well, these aren't really predictions, but you know, they do you know, there is one dimensional data, as you say, and it doesn't courage people to make bad decisions. And I mean, I was talking to a client last night, for instance, in, he's trying to say, well, you know what, if we're looking at properties in Paddington and Redfin and sari Hills, et cetera, or Balmain, and he's like, well, what if Paddington goes up more than Balmain? And I'm like, what you've got to understand is fundamentally the dynamics are pretty much the same in both suburbs. And it's the individual choice of property that is going to make the difference. You know, whereas when you look at this sort of data in, in a year, two years, three years, whatever, there's going to be a difference in terms of the median growth. And that's really going to have no bearing on how an individual property did or didn't and will, or won't perform, you know? And so people looking at this data to try to give themselves confidence that they're making good decisions, but it, it, it it's useless.

Veronica Morgan: But if you prepare, comparing, say, you know, Balmain and Paddington growth potential to say, maybe, I dunno, maybe you're looking in, I'm just plucking. I don't want to get in trouble here, but maybe you say, Oh, well I want to look at new castle instead. Or I want to have to throw that

Kent Lardner: You you've mentioned the castle, right? It,

Veronica Morgan: Well, I think new lamp is going to do better than, you know, it's like, it's a, it's ridiculous. No one can predict these things, but there's also the reality is they're they're in these biggest areas as you say, there's socioeconomic drivers, there's population drivers, there's economic drivers. There's all these sort of drivers. That basically means that the areas as a whole generally does points in the same direction. And it really does come to that individual property selection. So anyway, there you go. What else have you got any anomalies other than what we were talking about, the things that don't belong on the list, do you have any other nominees you want to talk about?

Kent Lardner: Yeah, look, I think by normally is that sometimes you're going to have an asking price it's entirely stable or going in one direction, but the selling price or the sole price goes in another direction. And it's because people in that particular market or in some of those examples, cherry picking the lower price properties to purchase. And hence the reason why you get a sole price meeting going in a very different direction.

Veronica Morgan: And you also mentioned there's a house market region that you'd like to highlight as falling price and Chaim and tree that what's that

Kent Lardner: Yeah. Up North way up North. So of Queensland so impacted by the impacted by the tourism issues. Yeah. So up around port Douglas. So it is, it is being impacted horrible. I mean, maybe people are selling their holiday homes. You know, cause it's not somewhere easily commutable say to work or they can have a second home, you know, in the JFC, a lot of holiday homes got smashed and especially where I'm at the Northern beaches sort

Chris Bates: Of peninsula and other pockets because everyone was like, well, I'll get rid of that. You know, need the cash need to keep on paying my mortgage on my first house and school fees and things like that. And maybe that's the sort of holiday home where people can't easily sort of commute to from the city. So they, they just got rid of it.

Veronica Morgan: It's been a problem area for some time, you know, like, so, and I think when we were filming the show, so we first started filming end of 2010 and we, the last episodes we filmed, I remember I think it was 2014. Right. And so we did do, we didn't do port Douglas, but we did do sort of around Trinity beach Clifton base that, that area we also did Northern beaches. And so we're talking in the years, not immediately after the GFC, but certainly very close right. Or 2010 was immediately after and going up to the Northern beaches. So two different areas of the Northern beaches. It, there was like literally a sign only every third house. And, and that was the case for a number of years. In fact, you know, probably till fairly recently, to be honest. And then, so it takes a long time for that stock to get absorbed into, in new buyers.

Veronica Morgan: And then, then with the up, when we were up in far North Queensland, we did a couple of episodes you want to kins, do you want to in a mission beach even further away, like two hours from Cannes. And and that one I'm talking around sort of Clifton Bay Palm Cove, that area, you know, there were properties up there that were on the market that were selling for less, not just less than what it would cost to build, but a lot less than what it costs them to build. You know? So you're actually getting the land at a discount with a house thrown in for free. And you just think, and there was a lot of that, a lot of it and you know, you just think, wow, I'm not sure I really want to commit to an area that that can happen.

Chris Bates: Yeah. I think that what's happened up where I am is that is now moved into our own or occupy driven market. Then a second home, a second homes actually more desirable now because of work from home. So that's, you know, I will get a set I in the pre COVID world, I would only go and use it on weekends. And even some weekends I couldn't use it because of my kids sport or something like that. But now people are saying, why should I come work there two days a week, plus I can do the weekends. And so then that makes that second home sort of more on the cards plus the owner-occupiers and, you know, as Sydney becomes more expensive, people are having to go further away from the city. Hence why occupies a moving further up. So but yeah, I think that it's interesting, the Cannes area, whole holiday from home at home sort of story that we're seeing everywhere. Once people are happy to get back on planes and they've already traveled to everywhere else in their state from their city. You know, maybe the, the Cannes area will do quite well. You know, the cherries

Kent Lardner: In Mark will bounce back if we start holidaying home. So I think it'd interesting to see how 20, 21 guys for these areas. Yeah. I just think it, it depends on a lot of international tourists as well, so, and it's, and it's one of the areas we called out very early in the piece because of the high proportion of employment in tourism and hospitality. So, but you know, it is why up there in both housing inventory, up around one year of, of inventory unit inventory up there is jumped way up. So it was around 10 months, it's up close to 14 months for units as well. So that's port Douglas Daintree does take a long time to sell a property, you know, 136 days on average at the moment. So yeah, it's it's, it's, it's in a little bit of trouble, but in the past it has bounced back.

Veronica Morgan: It's going to be interesting. We're interviewing Eliza Owen in a few weeks cause there's the pain and gain report, which, you know, everyone knows other than our own full of horse car. So that's my favorite report and that will be coming out. We'll be talking about what's that's showing because this is going to be an interesting, interesting actually to see where a property's losing money on the difference in the difference in percentage as well. And I guess we could almost predict what we're going to say based on some of this data that we're talking about.

Kent Lardner: Yes, exactly. It's always good on the game side because you see some James properties that haven't been touched for 50 years that they've just made squillions on.

Veronica Morgan: Well, well, okay. That is a very interesting overview of the largest price declines by which not all belong in the list. So thanks so much, Ken, what are we going to talk about next month? Why don't I just Chuck you on the spot here? Because we haven't discussed this, so what, what should we talk about next month?

Kent Lardner: Well, I'd like kind of like the idea of trolling through the internet and finding these top 10 lists that everyone loves to put out and then picking on them, picking them apart. So I think we could continue with this particular theme, unless Chris, have you got any, should we go the other way though? Not sports going down, but what's going up and start to say whether that's sort of fair to have them on the list as well.

Veronica Morgan: Okay. So we're looking at the top 10 price rising suburbs across the nation next month. Okay. On that note, we can better say goodbye.