Daily Telegraph

WHY BOTTOM OF MARKET IS ON TOP

Kaylee Cranley

Sydney’s falling property market has a surprising twist – unit prices in several key suburbs have crossed the $1m median mark for the first time, despite values falling across most of the market, new data shows.

Surging demand for more affordable homes, driven by interest rate hikes and the federal government’s First Home Guarantee scheme, has pushed more buyers into the lower end of the market, lifting unit medians in many areas.

While prices are declining across 75 per cent of the market, the cheapest 25 per cent is proving more resilient.

Analysis by Reventon and Hotspotting found 365 new additions to the national list of suburbs with million-dollar medians in the past year.

Reventon CEO Chris Christofi said NSW topped the list with 717 suburbs with million-dollar medians (103 of those were unit markets).

“These figures show that far from slowing down, the number of million-dollar markets continues to rise,” he said.

Hotspotting founder Terry Ryder said there were still opportunities for investors to find markets that were set to tip over into $1m.

“They are the markets where price growth has been steady in recent years and where demand remains strong,” he said. “With that trajectory set to continue, these markets will soon breach the million-dollar barrier. They are also strong markets for investors, where rents have been rising, yields are solid and vacancy rates are low.”

Brighton-Le-Sands was spotlighted as a hotspot set to tip into the million dollar territory, with a median unit price of $925,000.

Another suburb below the unit $1m median is Wentworth Point, at $745,000.

Sydneysider Lily Orminsby and her partner Gerhard Merrick recently purchased an apartment in Wentworth Point towards the start of the year for $925,000.

“It was a little bit more than we wanted to pay but the market was really competitive still at the time we bought,” Ms Orminsby said.

“It’s really nice to walk around by the water and all of the parklands and I just found it really convenient,” she said.

Mr Merrick said the properties were a higher quality than those of the same price in the Inner West, where they had been searching prior.

“For what you could spend to buy a house, the apartments are much more appealing,” he said.

“Especially for first home buyers,” Ms Orminsby added.

“All the houses are in a multimillion range, it’s a bit easier to get into the apartment market first and then move towards a house in the future.”