CHRIS ZAPPONE
September 18, 2009 - 12:11PM
Source: theage.com.au
The nation's most expensive houses are in Perth, with the coastal municipality of Cottesloe trumping inner-Sydney's Mosman in a ranking of municipal median prices.
A report by RP Data has found Cottesloe's median house price is $2 million, ahead of Mosman's $1.92 million.
By comparison, Melbourne's most expensive municipality - Stonnington, which includes the suburbs of Toorak, Armadale and South Yarra - had a relatively low median house price of $999,000.
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The median price for a home in Mosman, on Sydney's up-market north shore, was $1.67 million five years ago, considerably higher than the $1.05 million median price in Cottesloe at that time.
After Cottesloe and Mosman, the top two, came Nedlands in Western Australia at No.3, followed by Woollahra in NSW, Mosman Park in Western Australia, and Hunters Hill in NSW.
The 10 priciest council areas were found in Sydney and Perth. In Perth, prices have been driven higher by short supply caused largely by a mining sector boom that has led to workers flooding in.
Australian Property Monitors recently found that house prices nationally rose 3.3 per cent in the June quarter as the sharemarket recovered and the global economy showed signs of improvement.
On the other side of the property market, the cheapest houses were in the vast agricultural areas of the country, RP Data's analysis found.
In Victoria, the municipality of Hindmarsh, in the state's north-west corner, offered the most affordable housing in the state, with a median price of $81,500 in the year ending June 2009.
"Generally, our most affordable areas are made up of larger land masses and used for agriculture, mining and grazing, and where there is a small and declining population," said rpdata.com national research director Tim Lawless.
The most affordable municipality in NSW was Central Darling, occupying 53,000 square kilometres in western NSW. In the June quarter, the median house price there was $39,000.
In Western Australia, the most affordable municipality is Moora, in the Midlands, where the median price was $149,000.
"Australia's municipalities are a diverse lot," Mr Lawless said. "They range in size from the Shire of East Pilbara, which covers 372,000 square kilometres which is larger than Victoria and equal to the entire land mass of Japan, to the Peppermint Grove Shire in WA, which covers just one square kilometre and is Australia's smallest council region.
"The size of the council has no real bearing on the size of the property market. East Pilbara, for example, despite being the largest administrative region in Australia, recorded just five house sales over the past 12 months," Mr Lawless said.
czappone@fairfax.com.au
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