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Australians are not searching for property in trendy ‘name brand’ suburbs and are instead looking for practical locations within reach of a CBD, and preferably near water.
Melrose Park, 17 minutes from the Sydney CBD; Bundall on Queensland’s Gold Coast; Newcastle’s famous spot ‘The Hill’; Melville, 12 kilometres south of Perth; and the Adelaide suburb of Evandale made the top five list of every property featured on listings portal Homely.
Speaking exclusively to Residential Property Manager's sister publication, Real Estate Business, Homely chief executive officer Jason Spencer said releasing the Top 100 Suburbs across Australia involved reviewing over seven years of user-generated content from over 10 million people. Mr Spencer said there are more reviews about suburbs in built-up areas but software weightings take into account the volume of reviews.
“We have built these numbers up over seven years and use 22 scoring factors around whether or not a suburb has traffic, is noisy, what lifestyles are catered towards and what schools are available,” Mr Spencer said.
“Some will write one paragraph, others 1,500 words, but most people are passionate about schools.
“For example, if you follow a thread on private schooling versus public schooling people jump in and have their say on nearly every comment, and a lot of people from overseas get involved to gauge the reviews. A lot of the correspondence is from people helping other people to find a neighbourhood."
Mr Spencer said Homely is concentrating on gaining market share by offering a design-centric website with the ability to break the typical surfing habits users of other listing websites have fallen into. He added that REA and Domain have built up an offering based on consumer habits and said there is a fine line between changing the way people search for property and alienating users.
Raine & Horne’s business support and development manager, Greg Oddy, said Homely provides their agents with a platform to engage with consumers and give them a local voice to demonstrate their expertise.
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