Million-dollar bonus for Anglesea homeowners

ANGLESEA has cemented itself as one of Victoria’s top lifestyle destinations after house prices skyrocketed by almost $1 million in just five years.

The Surf Coast town is among the fastest-growing median house price suburbs in regional Victoria, according to new data from PropTrack.

Anglesea’s median house price was $1.77 million at the end of last month, up $952,000 from the same time in 2018 – a 117 per cent rise.

The town’s prices have grown at the sixth-fastest rate in regional Victoria during that period.

Great Ocean Properties director Marty Maher said Anglesea’s surging popularity among lifestyle buyers had driven its rise in recent years.

“There’s still a lot of absentee owners that are using their properties as holiday houses, whereas Torquay is much more owner-occupiers.

“There’s also the accessibility to Melbourne. So that people can know they’re going to use the property because it’s easy to access.

“And there’s also limited supply, which means in the good times for the market, like we saw during COVID, there’s going to be a lot of competition for properties.”

Mr Maher said the town’s multi-faceted appeal and supply constraints had held it in good stead in the presently stabilising property market.

“The median appears to have held up pretty well,” he said.

“[Anglesea] does attract quite a few different demographics and it’s got good infrastructure for that; you’ve got your holiday home buyers, you get your retirees, your permanents, and you still get some young families coming down.”

Looking ahead, Mr Maher said it was difficult to predict future trends with certainty due to the lingering impacts of interest rate rises, but said he expected Anglesea to continue faring well compared with the overall market.

“What we know is that a lot of people who buy in Anglesea are asset swapping, and are not necessarily affected as much directly by interest rates, but they are affected by the sentiment around it.

“Once rates start to ease off, the property market, I think, will continue to bubble along.

“But it wasn’t that long ago that it would have been unimaginable that we would be at levels like this.”