1 in 5 capital city residents looking to leave

As many as one in five Australians living in a capital city is considering a move closer to regional Australia, according to a report by renovation company Muval.

“Since government restrictions began in March 2020, there have been over 1 million searches for ‘moving house’ COVID-related questions. In turn, the home removals industry is challenged to keep up with demand,” Muval cofounder James Morrell said.

Citing data collected by the Regional Australia Institute, the report suggested that one in five capital city residents was considering moving to regional locales, while two-thirds of those potential migrants said they’d be looking to do so within the next 12 months.

The report found that Brisbane led the pack when it came to net migration, recording the highest level of growth relative to other capital cities at 96 per cent. In contrast, Sydney recorded 35 per cent negative net migration.

Commenting on the data, Dr Elin Charles-Edwards, a senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Queensland, said that decentralisation of Australia’s population away from cities to regional Australia has been “a longstanding government policy objective”.

“Since March 2020, the pandemic has expedited what decades of decentralisation policy has aimed to achieve, namely Australians migrating internally to regional areas,” she said.

According to her, “the potential positives to decentralisation include lower congestion in cities and economic growth in regional Australia. The challenge of increased demand for housing and services in regional areas includes preserving the very lifestyle that makes regional Australia attractive in the first place”.

Muval’s data lines up with similar findings by the Commonwealth back in May, who found that the flow of migrants from Australia’s capital cities to regional areas rose by 7 per cent over the period from March 2020 to March 2021. 

Speaking to nestegg in May, Westpac senior economist Matthew Hassan acknowledged that “especially from the perspective of people living in Sydney and Melbourne, the cost of property in regional areas looks very attractive. The median prices are a lot lower, as you’d expect.”

“On the other hand, I think what’s less visible is how different incomes tend to be in regional areas as well. If you’re in the lucky few who can move relatively easily and retain the incomes that you’d be earning at a capital city, for those buyers those are very real savings.”

The latest figures from the ABS suggested that a net of 43,000 Australians moved to regional areas from capital cities in 2020. 

Framing the data as the largest net inflow to the regions since the ABS began its tracker in 2001, ABS director of demography Phil Browning noted that despite the lockdown measures, “there are still many residential moves occurring within Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic”.