My perspective on how expensive housing is

If you missed Part 1 – What does $2,000,000 buy you in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne, click here, or back to the home page if you’d like to check out our range of services.

For this part of the analysis, I tried to keep it consistent with Part 1. To summarise, I tried to find recently sold houses (not apartments) relatively close to the city.

In this case, it was pretty difficult to find a house/villa/townhouse close to Sydney for $1m. The one I found close to the city did have some land but it was the size of a small apartment. I also found another property in Sydney with a bit of land in Normanhurst. This shows the difference in location for the same dollar price.

For the $1,000,000 selection, here are the four properties I found and their respective house prices:

Perth: 67 Woolwhich Street, West Leederville, WA, 6007,:   Sale price: $1,030,000 . Sold Nov-2017
Sydney 21 Chapman Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010.           Sale price: $1,080,000 . Sold Dec-2017
Sydney:. 23 Hammond Avenue Normanhurst, NSW, 2076  Sale price :$1,100,000 Sold Dec-2017
Melbourne: 10 Sutton Street, North Carlton, VIC  3054.      Sale price: $1,030,000 . Sold Feb-2018

You can click on the links to go to the realestate.com.au pages for respective properties.

So the results are similar as the $2,000,000 properties. For $1,000,000 you get a much smaller house in Sydney and Melbourne than in Perth unless you want to live considerably further out. To live close to the city in Sydney, you are paying nearly 7x more per $/sqm of land than in Perth. If you did want to pay a comparable $/sqm between Perth and Sydney, you have to go from being 7 minutes from the city to 37 minutes from the city.

One other interesting point is that the $/sqm rates for living space actually dropped in Sydney and Melbourne relative to the $2m properties. Perth increased however. Intuitively I would have expected more demand for $1m properties than $2m properties which would have led to an increase in $/sqm rates.

For Part 3, next month I’ll do $500,000 house prices for both apartments and houses as I suspect I will struggle to find any $500,000 houses priced near the Sydney CBD.