Australia’s top 25 performing suburbs for annual growth

The suburbs leading Australia’s tremendous property price growth have been identified, and they range from rural Queensland homes with a median price of $207,000 to $2.5 million houses in Sydney’s Inner West.

The latest Domain House Price Report shows some of the country’s lesser-known suburbs, including Parkhurst in Rockhampton, Queensland, Warana on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, and Darlington in Perth, recorded the biggest median-price increases in the past year, as more buyers discover these bridesmaid suburbs and demand continues to drive up prices.

Domain chief of research and economics Dr Nicola Powell says it’s normal to see a diverse group of suburbs experience significant price growth.

“It’s the natural dynamic of our housing market,” she says. “At the suburb level, they’re moving through a property cycle at slightly different times.”

Powell says this is similar to a ripple effect. Typically, it starts with the more premium suburbs and then slowly expands to more affordable suburbs.

“If the price has risen in the suburb that they highly desire, it does knock some buyers through to neighbouring suburbs,” she says.

An example is Warana on the Sunshine Coast, which has a median house price of $1.2 million and has grown 38.5 per cent in the past year.

SOLD - $1,500,000

2/14 Coorabin Street, Warana QLD 4575

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Local agent Minka Jenkins of Elite Lifestyle Properties says Warana was not “on people’s radar” until recently.

“Nobody ever knew Warana, and ever since COVID, it’s been discovered,” she says. “Warana is the postcode that envelops a lot of really good suburbs on a strip of beach that is 15 kilometres.”

Warana’s neighbours include Buddina (median house price of $1.3 million), Bokarina ($1.4 million) and Currimundi ($872,000).

Jenkins says there has been a growth in development in recent years, including new duplexes, old houses being knocked down for new builds, and renovations.

“With capital growth over the last few years, it’s still enticing to a developer,” she says.

This growth of development is also the key reason why Parkhurst in Rockhampton, Queensland, recorded a 54.2 per cent house price growth.

“Parkhurst is actually the growth corridor of Rockhampton,” says real estate agent Riley Neaton of Ray White Rockhampton.

SOLD - $1,090,000

27 Tomtit Avenue, Parkhurst QLD 4702

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“We’re starting to see more and more people extend out [to Parkhurst] with families and friends. There are new estates being developed, and the developers actually put a lot of effort and time into it all to make them family-friendly by putting a lot of parks and things to do.”

The median price for a house in Parkhurst is $680,000, and Neaton expects the median price to continue to grow in the coming years.

“It used to be more of a slower, sleepy area, with standard three-bedroom one-bathroom homes, but now a lot more prestigious homes are being built,” he says.

Powell says Parkhurst’s 54.2 per cent rate of growth is “extraterrestrial”, and suburbs that experience high levels of growth are typically those that “have seen vast amounts of change”.

Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia, in particular, are experiencing a monumental change in population through interstate and overseas migration, which have reflected in large price growth, she says.

“In WA, you’ve got demand coming from every which way,” Powell says. “You’ve got a tight rental market pushing people to purchase, which is why you might be seeing some of those more affordable locations in WA experiencing extraordinary rates of growth.”

SOLD - $1,052,000

28 Dalry Road, Darlington WA 6070

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Darlington recorded the state’s most significant annual growth, of 35.7 per cent, which local agent Lindsay Earnshaw of Earnshaw Real Estate attributes to that population growth.

“This is quite a sought-after area over the last 12 months and had a lot of people come here, and obviously the more people that come the old supply and demand thing happens,” he says. “Lots of low supply, high demand, high prices.”

Powell says there will always be a diversity of price growth at a suburban level, no matter what the market is going through. 

“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of sub-property markets going on, and all our suburbs don’t perform the same,” she says.

“Buyers now are much more mindful in terms of what they pay for a home and that is in itself going to steer demand towards more affordable suburbs, or that kind of mindset of, ‘Where can I get greater value for money?’ Buyers might be looking towards those particular suburbs in order to gain that.”