Nerida Conisbee

Do you go somewhere that may not offer such good public transport, such good retail precincts?

maybe a bigger drive into work and live in a bigger home?

Or do you sacrifice space and live in a far more desirable suburb?

It's always a balancing act that has to take place.

Yeah, look, this is a thing, and I think this is, you know, it is, I guess, a myth that house prices always increase in units.

I mean, if you go across Capital City, you know, a whole Capital City, that is the case, but get to a suburb level, and a really good example most recently for, you know, for people that are quite familiar with Sydney, that 12 months ago, Borkham Hills houses had the same median as Bellevue Hill apartments, and they were sitting at about $1.25 million.

Over the past 12 months, though, we've seen stronger growth for apartments in Bellevue Hill than we've seen for houses in Borkham Hill.

So, you know, I think it's always, you know, you do need to be aware of how markets move, that desirability of some suburbs does mean that apartments will increase faster than houses in less desirable suburbs.

But I think, you know, fundamentally for first home buyers, you know, my general advice is

Don't worry about what you buy.

It's always a good idea to get into the market as young as possible, as quickly as possible because then you can really take advantage of leverage.

You get on the property ladder and once you hit retirement and once you're sitting at a much more aged position, you are in a vastly different financial position to someone that remains a renter.

Yeah, it's been fascinating.

I mean, if you have a look at somewhere like the Illawarra now, Illawarra is getting very Sydney-like in its pricing.

Geelong, as you said before, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast are actually more expensive than Brisbane.

The regional shift was one of the more fascinating parts or the fascinating things that happened during the pandemic.

We did see more people move to regional Australia than had ever been recorded.

And it was interesting because over decades, we've seen government policy try to move people to regional areas, but it did take the pandemic to do it.

So lots of people moved to the regions.

A lot of areas that had never seen much price growth did start to move.