Someone who bought a house in Sydney’s northern beaches a decade ago would have made a median 145.9 per cent gain. The median house value in the area is almost $2.7 million.
Houses in sought-after parts of Sydney, including the eastern suburbs, inner west, north Sydney and Hornsby region, and Baulkham Hills and Hawkesbury area, are all up at least 130 per cent. Victoria and Queensland did not feature in the top 10 highest growth house markets.
At these levels, housing was competitive with some individual super funds, which had returns on high-growth products ranging from 117 per cent to 190 per cent.
Even the top performing unit markets had lower returns again, and units in regional hotspots topped the list after the pandemic prompted city dwellers to tree-change or sea-change.
Bendigo units are up 106.9 per cent in a decade, while Geelong, the NSW Central Coast and Illawarra, the Richmond-Tweed region around Byron Bay, Hobart and the Sunshine Coast all rose at least 89 per cent.
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Sydney’s eastern suburbs and northern beaches offered returns of close to 100 per cent each.
Some homeowners have been unlucky enough to see property values fall over the past decade.
House values are lower in a handful of outback or resource-affected areas that went through a boom and bust cycle during the mining boom, such as Western Australia – Outback (North), which includes the iron ore port of Port Hedland, where house values are 46.4 per cent lower than 10 years ago.
The figures do not take into account the obvious non-financial benefit of property — the opportunity to live in one’s own home.
CoreLogic head of residential research for Australia Eliza Owen said there was some element of luck in terms of the best and worst performing housing markets over the past decade, highlighting the shift to remote work that boosted commuting-distance regional towns, while resources towns suffered.
Sydney’s northern beaches had the highest house price growth in Australia over the past decade.Credit:Nick Moir
But she said the top performance in expensive areas of Sydney suggests “you need money to make money”.
“It does benefit those who are on higher incomes, or have the family wealth and support, that enables them access to get into these markets,” she said.
“It is probably more advantageous from a financial perspective to be able to buy into a high-value housing market, and that’s another form of inequity that is evident in this scheme.”
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