Once Australia's second priciest city, Melbourne has become more affordable | Hacker News Reader

Once Australia's second priciest city, Melbourne has become more affordable

theguardian.com

22 pointsPaulHoule18 comments

“the Victorian government introduced extra land tax for investors, amounting to about $1,300 a year for a property worth $650,000. A levy on platforms such as Airbnb and expanded taxes on vacant properties and land came soon after.”

Along with strong and consistent new construction are cited as the drivers behind this but the catalyst has been remote work and the COVID lockdowns.

Victoria’s lockdowns were particularly onerous and many Melbournites realised they could move to south east QLD and pocket the potentially massive difference between the QLD and VIC properties, while still earning capital city $$$ and having better weather.

Melbourne will surge again eventually as their government takes a long view on infrastructure while QLD is adversarial to public utilities.

That sounds like common sense. People who own homes and don't live in the country, let alone that property should be last on the list.

Have you seen an analysis of the relative impact of the taxes versus allowing growth versus external factors?

I recently returned to Melbourne after being away for 5 years. They've been building a lot, particularly in the Western suburbs, and in satellite towns. Also there are a lot more people working remote / hybrid and living farther out in the country. A house in a smaller city like Bendigo is $400+ a week. But I expect this has been driving prices in Melbourne down -- but I'd hardly call it 'affordable' at ~$500 a week for a small house.

Competition at the $500 per week range is intense, because there are many people who can't afford more than that.

Off topic but: seeing rent measured per week is so very strange (to me; and I suspect to most Europeans and US/Canadians).

It's not uncommon in NZ/Aus to be paid weekly and pay rent weekly. I find monthly rent to be just as strange!

Somebody needs to teach NZ/Aus the concept of the float.

I worked somewhere they moved payday by 1d explicitly for financial reasons ...

Let's split the difference and go bi-weekly. Or bi-monthly. Or some other arbitrary period we can define "ambiguously".

You don't need to argue it out with HN, if you want to negotiate landlords generally are happy to at least consider it. I've paid rent as an annual lump sum before.

Olympic swimming pools of rent.

That sounds like a lot. Like, Uncle Scrooge amounts.

Landlords earn more that way, because months are 28,30,31 days but weeks are constant 52/year, even in leap years.

The house always wins, I guess.

Makes more sense since most live week-by-week. Similar to how AM/PM notation makes more sense since it's how we tell time. US date format is harder to defend, but...

I'll be called a heretic but, a couple of years ago (after being back in a country that uses day/month/year instead of the US), I came to the conclusion that the month/day notation is actually more useful to me.

Quite often, the month of the date is more relevant to me than the day. Knowing at a glance whether something is happening in the same month as the current day, or in the same month as some other date, is more convenient, as is being able to easily group things by month visually.

And yeah, I can definitely acknowledge month/day/year makes no sense, but it works for me.

Just left from a month work there, and what I heard is that everybody is moving from Melbourne to Mildura, because more affordable, more work, and less needles in the parks and beaches.

"more affordable" but still very expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com