Melbourne’s fringes have long been the most affordable place for homebuyers, but rising land prices could put the dream out of reach for average income earners.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.The empty field on the south side of the train tracks just beyond Rockbank has no address; just another patch of weedy earth on the volcanic plains west of the city, sure to flash by unnoticed by the thousands of daily commuters on the Melton line.
The area is more than 30 kilometres west of the CBD, and its list of services is modest: it has a V/Line station, a bus that runs every 40 minutes, a primary school and a general store. Its appeal lies not in its amenity but the fact that it has some of Melbourne’s cheapest land for housing.Gurpreet Verma paid less than $300,000 for his 400-square-metre lot in 2020. He bought the land for his daughter Rhea, 21, who is studying podiatry at Monash University.
It will take time, but the state government will eventually build infrastructure for the area, such as the promised Melton Hospital and even potentially a new train station at Thornhill Park, which is unfunded but in the Victorian Planning Authority’s precinct structure plan.Advertisementlike spilled ink, first along the veins of its rail lines, then filling the car-dependent spaces in between.
“The cliff-fall in greenfield sales”, as the institute put it, has led Perth to eclipse Melbourne as the highest-selling capital city market last year, despite being less than half Melbourne’s size.The series of headwinds has analysts in Melbourne’s property sector concerned that the market is headed for an even tougher period.
On stage in the CBD hotel conference room, Bougias presented a slide that calculated changing land values on Melbourne’s fringes in three ways – all of which were bad news for average buyers hoping for a detached house and yard of their own. “The nature of the buyer has changed,” he said. “Currently around 50 to 60 per cent of all purchases are made by professionals.”Urban Development Institute of Australia chief executive Linda Allison said that if the state government was truly focused on tackling the housing affordability, it would accelerate the release of land in the greenfields.
Commonly found in native grasslands west of Melbourne, the earless dragon was once considered extinct due to habitat loss and predators like foxes and feral cats.The master’s mate on the British ship that transported the first government officials from Sydney to Port Phillip, John Norcock, described the western grasslands as “enchantingly beautiful” in an 1836 diary held by the National Library.
“It’ll be ongoing for quite a while now,” he said. “It’s an order of magnitude bigger and more time-consuming than for other threatened species because we need to check the traps daily … it’s a cryptic species, quite hard to find.” New housing and tourist activity such as boating at Wyndham Harbour is generating traffic problems for established farmers in Werribee South, the City of Wyndham said.
Butt warns Melbourne is beginning to hit the geographical limits of potential growth, despite the continuing lobbying of property interests to open up new areas for greenfields housing. “We seem to be incapable of building the sorts of social and physical infrastructure those places need, like transport and schools, and the cost factor is one big one. It’s an utterly inefficient way for us to build a city.”
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