SOUTH AUSTRALIA
STANDOUT LOCATION:
City of Marion: The Marion LGA is typical of middle-market Adelaide, offering quality homes close to infrastructure and jobs nodes at prices that Sydney and Melbourne buyers can only dream about. Expect suburbs like Mitchell Park and Sturt to show growth in 2018.
2017 reviewed
Onkaparinga: Most research sources had Adelaide growing an average 4%-5% in 2017. Many suburbs in the Onkaparinga LGA did considerably better, headed by Old Noarlunga (12%), O’Sullivan Beach (10%), Seaford Rise and Willunga (both 7.5%).
Improvement in the state economy and upcoming major infrastructure events bring overdue focus to Adelaide, where affordability is attractive compared with the big cities.
CommSec’s State of the States report has elevated South Australia from No. 6 to No. 4 in the ranking of state and territory economies. And the latest employment data from the ABS shows the SA jobless rate (trend data) dropping to 5.6%, the lowest in five years.
Given the correlation between the health of the state economy and the performance of the property market, this bodes well for Adelaide. I expect the SA capital will surprise property observers with its positive progress in 2018.
Adelaide already has a busy property market, headed by the Marion LGA in the south-west of the metropolitan area. This is middle-market Adelaide but its price levels look like the affordable lower end in Sydney and Melbourne. Another growth precinct is the far northern suburbs (Playford and Salisbury LGAs), which contain some of the cheapest houses in capital city Australia.
Outside Adelaide there are plenty of solid regional centres – Port Lincoln, Mount Gambier, Goolwa, Victor Harbor, the towns of Barossa Valley – but none with compelling reasons to grow strongly in the foreseeable future.
But Port Augusta, where the median house price is below $200,000, has the potential to become a boom town if some of the proposed energy projects come off.