It’s useful, I think, to look back and see how the market performed in the past 12 months and what that means for 2022.
While solid past performance isn’t always an indication of how well things will perform in the future, it does gives those who already own an investment property a bit of an indication of how well their assets are performing.
The latest CoreLogic figures – up to the end of 2021 – show that, as we predicted 18 months ago, the Australian property market has performed extremely well, with price growth at boom-time levels.
Dwelling values, that is all residential properties, houses and units combined, increased by 22% last year as an average across the nation.
Houses, as is usually the case, performed better with growth of 24.5% while units overall rose 14%.
Of course, the Australian property market is extremely varied and this isn’t really an indication of how your personal property performed, but it does give you a good idea of what the trend is at the moment – and the trend is that prices are going up and markets are firing.
There are plenty of individual suburbs which will have recorded better price growth than the capital city or state figures, and also some which didn’t do quite as well.
That’s why it’s important that you choose the right market to invest in and the right property in the right market.
One thing that 2021 did confirm is that you don’t have to invest in the big cities to achieve good property price growth.
Values for houses in regional parts of Australia increased by 24.6% last year while those in capital cities increased by 23.9%.
In fact, the exodus to affordable lifestyle trend – which have been under way for many years – picked up speed during the pandemic and that has driven up prices in regional centres throughout Australia – with regional New South Wales recording the highest price growth of 31% last year.
Second was Brisbane with price growth of 30%, followed by Regional Tasmania and Sydney with growth of 29%.
Values in Canberra rose 27%, Adelaide 26%, regional Qld 25% and regional Victoria 24%.
What we have seen is there are plenty of locations, particularly the smaller capital cities and key regional areas, that did really well in 2021.
The rate of price growth did decline slightly towards the end of 2021 in Sydney and Melbourne, but it’s too soon to be sure about what that means for 2022.
And for the smaller capital cities and many regional areas, the pace of growth is actually picking up there, not slowing down.
In December Brisbane was up 3.1%, Adelaide 2.7%, regional Qld 2.6%, regional NSW 2.5%, and regional South Australia 2.3%.
These are the places we expect to see more strong growth in 2022.
