Brisbane still boasts suburbs that are affordable to first home buyers and in which ongoing development is likely to keep pushing price growth.
Runcorn and Keperra – 19km and 9km respectively from the CBD – are among areas offering the best prospects for houses, while the closer Mt Gravatt East and Cannon Hill are showing the strongest growth for apartments, according to PRD Nationwide’s half-yearly Hotspots report.
“All of these places have had positive growth over the past 15 months,” PRD Nationwide’s national research manager Asti Mardiasmo said.
“There’s good rental yields in all of these areas and most of them have a lower vacancy rate than the average for Brisbane.”
The suburbs highlighted in the report may not be the ones showing the greatest level of price growth in the Queensland capital, but they are within reach of buyers taking out a loan worth $328,531 – the average for Queensland as a whole in December, rather than for Brisbane – and assume an 80 per cent loan-to-value ratio.
Strong growth – in some cases higher growth – came in more expensive suburbs including Herston, where houses have jumped 28 per cent over the past 15 months to $807,500 and Holland Park West, where units have risen 13.7 per cent.
The figures show that good-quality housing in the state capital remains affordable for people across Queensland, Dr Mardiasmo said.
“Most of them are close to your public transport, education institutions, schools, your roads, your rail,” she said. “Even though they are affordable, you’re not creating this notion that to be affordable you have to be far away. You don’t have to be monk and send a smoke signal. You will still get NBN over there. ”
While some suburbs are benefiting directly from infrastructure spend, such as Mt Gravatt East, where developments worth about $466 million – including upgrades on Logan Motorway & Gateway Extension Motorway – are due to take place this year, others are showing a pipeline of residential and other spend that means they are likely to benefit from continued price growth, Dr Mardiasmo said.
“There is development going into these areas,” she said. “Whether it’s residential or commercial, there’s something that will keep it sustainable in terms of growth. These are not one-hit wonders where you have growth this year and don’t have any more going in the next 2-3 years.”
While the coming federal election could cause uncertainty, last week’s Reserve Bank interest rate cut would conversely boost confidence, leading to no net change in the property market, Dr Mardiasmo said.
“It’s very interesting to me that the RBA just cut their cash rate before the election,” she said.
“It’s almost like a preventative measure for anything that might happen before the election, in the sense that an election will always shake up people’s confidence a bit. Those two will balance each other out in terms of appetite for spending and investing.”