Does South East Queensland still deserve attention?

Looking at the state at large, the expert said that interstate migration has played a key role.

“Queenslanders now [have] had seven consecutive quarters where the interstate migration has been 3,000 people or more, and that’s significant because Queensland had not seen one quarter of 3,000 people migrating since December 2007,” Mr Pressley said.

“Things that influence that is actually [Sydney], the prolonged period of the Sydney boom, and if you’re not in the Sydney property market, a lot of people have given up… [but] over that same period of time where Queensland’s increasing, Sydney is [decreasing].

“But they’re not all coming to Brisbane, and this is I think what a lot of New South Wales and Victoria people overlook.”

Mr Pressley pointed out that the misconception stems from how 75 per cent of people in Victoria live in Melbourne, and 68 per cent of people in New South Wales live in Sydney, but only 48 per cent of people in Queensland live in Brisbane.

“There are more people who live in regional Queensland than the state’s capital; people see the Queensland figure and automatically assume: ‘Well, that’s Brisbane’, that’s only half of [Queensland].

“If you picture Queensland on a map, up and down the coast of Queensland, there’s about a dozen large regional cities on the coast from Cairns in the far north to the Gold Coast into the far south and even inland. Toowoomba is Australia’s second-largest inland city; the only city bigger than it is Canberra.”

With that 48 per cent in mind, Mr Pressley said that while the area proves to be a better choice to invest into than Melbourne and Sydney, it still is not worth the hype.

“We think the outlook is for mild price growth, which is what we have seen over the last two years. If anything, slightly better than what we’ve seen the last couple of years,” Mr Pressley said.

“Nothing spectacular, but then if you compare that to the Sydney and Melbourne market, it’d be much smarter buying in South East Queensland and other parts of Australia than Sydney and Melbourne right now — absolute no-brainer.”

Mr Pressley said that, currently, Sydney is trending towards a decline, while Melbourne’s rate of growth is definitely smaller than it used to be, indicating that declines could be just around the corner.

“If it continues, Sydney’s going backwards. It’s not crashing, but it’s now in its fifth consecutive month of price decline. Now each of those declines are small, but five consecutive months is a trend,” the expert said.

“Melbourne hasn’t had any months of price declines, but the rates of growth are significantly less than what they saw for those four strong years, and we think we’re probably only a couple of months away before we hear the Domains and CoreLogics of the world saying: ‘Oh, there was a small fall in Melbourne property prices last month’.”

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• Expert advice
• Qld week

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