Alice Stolz

Good morning, Craig.

Great to be with you.

It is really incredible to think we now have multiple regional million-dollar clubs.

We've always talked about million-dollar clubs in the inner-city areas, particularly of Melbourne and Sydney, but to see that now permeating around to the regional areas is quite extraordinary.

That's right.

Look, it's an extraordinary situation.

And I think one point to press on here is how much Australians love lifestyle locations.

And it really shows now that many Aussies are willing to pay a premium for that lifestyle location.

And that was really evident during the pandemic with many Sydney and Melbourne city slickers taking their city salaries and moving to the regions.

And what that's done is really turbocharged the price growth in those areas.

And often these residents move there with massive pools of equity that had made on their properties in the big Sydney and Melbourne markets.

And then they took that money and then put it into property in the regions.

And now what it's doing is sort of disrupting the locals, so to speak.

And that's why I think we're seeing, you know, Byron's new median house price is $1.8 million now, whereas Ballina is $1.1 million.

And you can see the areas surrounding Byron, like Ballina, are sort of the ones who are picking up the pieces of those displaced locals who have been sort of forced out of where they were living because they just cannot afford the rent or property prices if they were between houses during this absolute boom time in the regions.

It's a really sort of sad situation because often what happens is it's not until those parents potentially...

And there's an estate that's carved up and potentially given to the kids that the kids are actually going to have that money and actually sort of reap the rewards, I say in air quotes, of what the parents invested in all those decades prior.

But yet again, what it's doing is really pushing people away from their home, I suppose, of those areas where they grew up.

the local country school that they went to that they thought they'd send their children to, the church down the road they might have got married at.

They're now really having to go further and further out.