How to identify future growth areas

A lot of people won't buy in an area that the locals don't favour, and in all cities and regional areas we always have suburbs that aren't quite as favourable for the locals to live in.  Areas that may have slightly higher crime rates, a lower socio-economic group and very often we won't buy there. One of the things to know about those kinds of areas is that sometimes the ugly duckling can become the beautiful swan in the future. But not all ugly duckling areas grow into that beautiful swan. You need to look for the growth drivers. You need to look for growing population, gentrification and a council that's spending money on infrastructure. If you have that, then the area is one of those ugly duckling areas you can pretty well expect that in the future it's probably going to return you a good return and grow into a much better suburb in the future.