Australia's highest property turnover areas revealed – and where home owners are holding on the longest
We’ve heard of the tightly-held suburbs that home owners never want to leave – but what about the areas with the highest property turnover?
Does an exceptionally high proportion of sales in one area mean that the opposite is true – that home owners want to leave?
According to Domain’s chief of research and economics, Dr Nicola Powell, the rate at which properties are turning over in an area says more about the state of the market and its demographics than it does about the area itself.
New analysis from Domain has revealed the areas with the highest turnover of property in Australia, as well as those with the lowest turnover rate, or in other words, the most tightly-held regions.
The turnover rate is based on how many properties were sold in the 12 months to December 2023 as a proportion of total properties in the region.
“It can give you an indication of how easy or hard it is to break into that particular market and there are various factors that influence turnover,” Powell says.
Areas with a high percentage of rentals often have a higher turnover rate, particularly when their investor owners come under financial strain from higher interest rates and escalating mortgage repayments, Powell says.
“Some areas are always going to have higher levels of activity than other areas and it might be that there’s a bigger pool of rental stock,” she says.
“What we’ve seen in many areas over 2023 was investors offloading properties because they were unable to afford the higher cost of debt … these locations had a higher turnover rate.”
This was the case for Springfield-Redbank in Brisbane’s outer western suburbs, which recorded a 10.9 per cent turnover rate in the 12 months to December – the highest turnover rate of all SA3 regions in Australia.
Peter Ta of Strud Property, who specialises in the Redbank area, confirmed the region experienced a lot of activity in the last year driven by investors.
“I’d say a lot of Redbank Plains area – which has about 8000 homes – is predominantly 60 per cent of investors and 40 per cent owner-occupiers,” he says.
“And it seems in the last year, with interest rate rises, a lot of investors were selling and the people that are buying these are first-home buyers too, or people looking at downsizing, because you get value for money here.”
Domain’s House Price Report showed Springfield-Redbank’s median house price is $631,000, while its unit price was $423,000.
The data shows Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast has a high turnover rate of 10.5 per cent, followed by the Port Douglas-Daintree region, with a 9.7 per cent turnover rate.
“It’s just high demand … if you look at it and base it on prices in Sydney and Melbourne, people want to buy property in Surfers Paradise,” says Bob Rollington of Surfers Paradise First National.
“We had an increase in demand in the last couple of years but before that, the last 10 years before, we saw very little activity so the market is just playing catch up now. It presents excellent value for money.”
Ta says prospective buyers should see a high turnover rate as a positive market indicator; he says a high number of sales gives buyers and sellers a very clear picture of property values.
“Some people feel like they overpaying in the market, but if there’s like 20 homes that have sold in the last seven days, you really have a good guide on how much property is worth,” he says.
There have also been a lot of home owners who’ve made a lot of money on property in the past few years, Ta says. That’s provided them with plenty of incentive to sell, particularly investors.
“I think most of the reason why people are selling at the moment seems to be because of their capital growth. They purchased in 2021 or 2019 … and now that they’ve got so much capital, they want to pull out of it and maybe upsize their home or push it into another investment, or consolidate a bit of debt.”
The lowest turnover rates: where are people holding on to their homes the longest?
The areas with the lowest turnover included Lower Murray in NSW at 0.4 per cent, Canberra East in the ACT at 0.5 per cent, and Daly-Tiwi-West Arnhem in the Northern Territory, which recorded a 1.2 per cent turnover rate.
“You’ll find that the areas with a lower turnover are probably areas where people stay there for longer periods of time,” Powell says. “If you’re buying something that is mid to high priced, you’re viewing it as a long-term family home where you’ll be there for 10-plus years.”
“You generally find the entire area will be like that in terms of demographics and the reasons why people move to those locations is because they’re highly sought after.”
For instance, Powell says properties in Canberra East – which includes the suburbs of Pialligo, Symonston, Oaks Estate and part of Hume – are “extremely hard to get into because it’s a small residential area”.
“If you’re looking to an area that has low turnover, it means probably that you need to put your best foot forward in terms of your offer,” Powell adds.
“When turnover is low, it does indicate that it’s hard to break into that particular location … so, when a home comes onto the market, [it will] probably sell very quickly.”
In Tasmania’s South East Coast, where the turnover rate is just 2.2 per cent, Greg Jones of Raine & Horne Sorell says the region has been “very quiet compared to previous years”.
“I think a lot of it’s got to do with the fact that we’ve probably had a bit of a boom here for probably four years from about 2018 through to 2022 and now, I think prices have crawled back … and a lot of owners are holding onto their property because they believe we’ll see that boom again,” he says.
“It’s not good (to have a tightly held market) from our point of view because suddenly we want to sell a lot more so it’s probably been as tight as I can remember it and I’ve been in real estate for nearly 19 years. People are just hanging on and the flow of sales is just not happening or not at a fast degree … but this is a cycle really, it’ll come back up.”
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