Despite the Berejiklian government’s attempts to make housing more affordable for Sydneysiders, affordability, on the whole, has continued to worsen.
There are now no Sydney suburbs left with a median house price below $500,000, according to the Domain Group.
Five years ago, 159 Sydney suburbs had median house prices of less than half a million dollars. By March of this year, this had dwindled to four suburbs.
In June, there was one suburb left standing: Willmot, which had a median house price of $485,000.
As of this writing, not one suburb remains below this median threshold.
The closest suburb to the half-a-million-dollar price point is Tregear, which has a median house price of $510,000, followed by Willmot, where the median house price has risen to $515,000, according to September quarter data from the Domain Group.
The three other suburbs that come closest to matching this price point are Blackett ($525,000), Mount Druitt ($530,000), and Shalvey ($530,000).
Prices at the lower end of the Sydney property market have continued to climb, even though property prices on the whole have begun to soften. Sydney’s property prices dropped for the first time in nearly one-and-a-half years, falling 0.1% in September, according to CoreLogic.
Suburbs with a median house price under the $600,000 range are also dwindling fast; there are now just 17 suburbs in this category out of the hundreds in the Greater Sydney basin, Domain Group said.
“Sydney has now waved goodbye to the half-a-million dollar mark, and it’s possible a surge in first-home buyers is behind this,” said Andrew Wilson, chief economist at the Domain Group.
First-home buyer data released in August by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed an uptick in the number of entry-level buyers in NSW. This increase was likely the result of the stamp duty concessions introduced in July.
The concessions also likely pushed Willmot above the $500,000 threshold, and helped propel the median house price in surrounding Blacktown area locations, according to Taj Singh, co-founder of First Home Buyers Australia.
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