With every updated set of house price data comes the inevitable comparison between houses and units. Gee, don't those units seem cheap compared to the houses in the same suburb?
📊Then you see the wild discrepancies. Mount Waverley with a $1.005m median compared to just $281k in Albion? What is going on?
Besides Albion being an undesirable suburb (and also being why Sunshine is a waste of time as an activity centre), the devil is in the details.
Mid-20th-century suburbs like Mt Waverley, Glen Waverley, Caulfield South or Moorabbin are full of older villa units, which were subdivisions of very large blocks. These are mostly 2 or 3 bedrooms with a reasonable footprint of land. The higher land value in these areas mean they also see a greater number of semi-detached townhouses built in more recent times.
Meanwhile, suburbs like West Footscray or Preston are more of a mixed-bag, with a higher number of recently built, investor-grade units which are going backwards in value, dragging the median down.
A dual-occupancy, recent townhouses in Box Hill North is a fundamentally different product to basic apartments in West Footscray. Why do they keep getting lumped in together as units?
🤔It would be great to see these housing reports from Domain and the like split out apartments from townhouses to get a better picture of what is going on. Because I suspect the value of townhouses is going up, whilst apartments are barely moving in most of these areas.