Real estate: Where you can still buy a home in a big city near the BEACH for less than $200,000
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Australians can still buy a $200,000 home in a major capital city near a beach if they opt for an apartment over a house.
Some of the most affordable homes are still an hour’s drive from a major central business district, CoreLogic data shows.
Orelia, in Perth’s outer south, is the most affordable metropolitan suburb with a median unit price of just $183,522, and is just a suburb from Kwinana Beach, near Rockingham.
Nearby Shoalwater, right on the beach, is slightly more expensive at $243,797 while neighboring Cooloongup is $251,434.
Australians can still buy a $200,000 home in a major capital city near a beach if they opt for an apartment over a house (pictured, Shoalwater in Perth’s outer south)
Orelia, in Perth’s outer south, is the most affordable metropolitan suburb with a median unit price of just $183,522, and is just a suburb from Kwinana Beach, near Rockingham.
Greater Perth was home to five of Australia’s most affordable suburbs for units, with the remainder being in south-east Queensland, mainly Logan and Ipswich.
Ipswich, southwest of Brisbane, is particularly affordable and Goodna has a median unit price of $233,344.
Slightly closer to the Gold Coast, Logan Central has a midpoint apartment price of $235,668.
The 10 most affordable suburbs for apartments have median prices that are less than half Australia’s median apartment price of $597,198 and a small fraction of the typical Bondi Beach apartment price of $1,272,175, which follows a annual drop of 18.1 percent.
With interest rates set to continue to rise in 2023, buyers of cheaper apartments are much less likely to experience mortgage stress when they can’t pay their bills.
Very limited rental vacancies also mean that those buying a cheap rental unit would benefit from higher rental yields, where an owner divides their annual rental income by the price of the property and multiplies it by 100 to get a percentage.
A bit closer to the Gold Coast, Logan Central (apartment block, pictured) has a midpoint apartment price of $235,668
Orelia has the highest unit rental yield in Australia at 9.7 per cent, with a median rent of $317 per week.
The monthly rental income of $1,403 would be nearly double the monthly mortgage payment of $786 on a median-priced unit of $183,522 for an investor with a 20 percent deposit.
Perth has an ultra-tight rental vacancy rate of 0.4 percent, while in Brisbane it is 0.8 percent, SQM Research data showed.
When it comes to houses in the capital, Elizabeth North in North Adelaide has the cheapest median price at $291,526, CoreLogic’s Best of the Best 2022 report showed.
Kwinana town center in Perth’s outer south also has a cheap midpoint house price of $300,252.
The 10 cheapest housing markets in Australia’s capitals are in Adelaide and Perth.
But regional areas remained the cheapest markets with Peak Hill, near Dubbo in west-central New South Wales, posting a median house price of $180,870.
The Albury suburb of Lavington in southern New South Wales, near the Victorian border, has the cheapest median unit price of $251,406.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sydney’s eastern suburbs were home to the most expensive real estate in Australia, both for units and houses.
Vaucluse had Australia’s most expensive median home price of $7,943,965, while nearby Point Piper had the most expensive median home price of $2,895,563.