Sydney and Melbourne liked by expats, but housing prices holding the cities back

If you’re thinking of making the leap overseas, your best option might be south-east Asia – at least, that’s the finding from a global expat survey, which has ranked 82 cities across the world.

Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, took out the top spot for the second year in a row, followed by Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore, with Montreal coming in fifth.

And if you’re considering Europe, there’s some good news – slots six to 10 are found there, with  Lisbon, Barcelona, Zug, The Hague, and Basel rounding out the top 10.

The rankings are based on the InterNations Expat Insider Survey, which had 20,000 participants worldwide living in 187 countries or territories.

When it comes to our neck of the woods, Sydney comes in at 16th and Melbourne at 29th with both scoring well above Auckland, at 64th.

Housing was a key point factor holding the two cities back, said InterNations founder and co-chief executive Malte Zeeck.

“They do really well in most categories included in the ranking, but the biggest difference does lie in the respective performance for finance and housing,” he said.

One recent arrival, Californian Bryan Lim, says he hasn’t found the rental situation too bad but he thinks his experience is tempered by coming from San Francisco. Famous for its unaffordable housing, the US city was ranked 77th by InterNations this year.

Mr Lim made the move around three months ago for a job opportunity and lives in the Sydney CBD.

“It is expensive – I still think, as a percentage of my salary and adjusting for market rates, it’s still less than what it is in San Francisco,” he said. “I feel like you do get a little bit more.”

In terms of friendliness, he found Sydney less cliquey than Silicon Valley, describing people as “more open”, although on the flip side, retail service wasn’t as helpful as it was in the US.

Mr Lim says he also enjoys being walking distance to work, and finds the city “totally walkable and safe at night”.

He said while the cost of renting probably wouldn’t affect his decision to stay, the general cost of living would.

“Everything else besides rent feels like it costs more,” he says. “I think that the Americans who do want to stay here feel like their dollars go further.”

In the InterNation survey results, released on Tuesday, Sydney posted a slight improvement in the housing category, with 73 per cent of respondents finding the city unaffordable compared with 82 per cent last year.

Meanwhile, Melbourne performed worse in the finance category, with around 36 per cent of the respondents unhappy with their disposable income, compared to 27 per cent last year. Difficulty in finding housing has also risen, with 35 per cent of respondents running into barriers, compared to 20 per cent in 2018.

Melbourne outperforms Sydney when it comes to local transportation, ranking 47th compared to Sydney’s 55th, and there were specific responses to the survey which highlighted how bad Sydney’s parking and traffic was, compared to the Victorian capital which had its public transport singled out for praise by several American expats.

As for why people chose to move to Australia, the results showed that a better quality of life was a more significant factor for Sydney than it was for many other cities.

“On a global scale, twice the share of expats mention work-related reasons as their main motivation for moving abroad, so while Sydney does attract international talent, working there is not necessarily the primary reason for relocating,” Mr Zeeck said.

Mr Zeeck stressed that responses around factors like work-life balance were measured from respondent’s perceptions. They did not measure things like the number of public holidays, although when asked about hours worked in a full-time job, Sydney’s respondents posted less than the global average.

But what do the rankings mean for existing residents? Aside from getting a glimpse of how the cities appear to outside eyes, the rankings also provide a glimpse of how expats perceive the local residents themselves, Mr Zeeck says, due to the rankings for local friendliness and ease of connecting to a social network.