NSW Sydney Market..where is it heading..a personal view..

Hmm I got an email from rea saying it was 80.12%

 

Northern beaches market seems rock solid in my area of interest (Narraweena, beacon hill, Cromer). Went to an auction on the weekend in Narraweena. About 30ish people there. Sold for $1.39 million. Nothing out of the ordinary.

 

20 Sydney suburbs now buyers' markets

 

Campbelltown has a median of around $550k. Looking at last 20 houses sold 75% are under that median house price with 6 selling in the 4's

 

Is there any free site I can find stats per suburb on how many houses on the market per month and also time on market stats per month?

 

I am not sure, can't remember if onthehouse.com.au used to do this - i did have a site i used to use.

this one is close with historical data

Christie Downs Real Estate Old Listings

 

Back to the Epping discussion (and really... any Sydney suburbs that are intensely Chinese-favoured specifically for their quality-school-catchment radius...), I am fascinated by this market segment who are obsessed on buying in 'best school' catchment zones.

I don't have kids nor have any idea how schools are run in terms of maximum intake numbers, but surely all schools have a maximum cap of students they can take in, right? I.e. there are only so many classrooms in a high school's grounds, and so many hours in the day to teach lessons in those rooms...

What I am getting at and asking is, if areas like Epping have say half a dozen Chinese-favoured high schools within them (for example), then each high school probably only has, what, a maximum of say 200 student limits per year (form), so that's years 7-12 = 6 x 200 = 1200 students per school. 6 schools = say (very roughly) 7,200 places every year as a maximum for all the 'good' schools in the area.

Councils keep greenlighting more and more higher-density apartment builds in these Epping-ish areas of Sydney (I.e. Chinese-favoured good-quality schooling areas). And these properties are gobbled up by either owner-occupier or investor buyers who want them so that their 'occupants' can live within a good school's catchment zone, so their kids qualify to enroll in these schools.

But surely, these schools must surely be at breaking point in terms of being not only at-capacity for intake, but have waiting lists so horrendously long that anyone who newly moves into these crowded areas will have a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting their kid enrolled in these schools before the kid turns, like, 29 or something?!

My rambling point above is this: Don't people realise they won't get their kids into these schools they are so desperate to 'buy' into by purchasing a property within the catchment zone's boundaries? I know it (hopefully) isn't the 'sole' reason why certain ethnicities choose to live in certain ethnic hotspots (I get it.. sense of community, local grocery and retail stores that stock products of their cultural preference etc.), but schooling is pretty much one of the major considerations that some ethnic groups have when choosing where to live.

So... don't they realise how hopeless it is to say buy into an area like Epping where the schools are already maxed out with waiting lists? What are they hoping to achieve by buying there, if they can't get their kid into the schools there?

I'm no demographer or anything but it all seems a bit off-kilter, the school-zone based property growth rates of the Eppings, Chatswoods, Burwoods, Hurstvilles etc. of Sydney?

 

Schools have to take all children within their catchment zone. If there are too many kids, they truck in demountables and hire more teachers.

Catchment zones can shrink over time tho. A few years back I lived in a street that was in the catchment for a top 100 school. Within 2 years the boundary had changed and we were out of catchment. It would need to be done similarly out epping way too. You'd be devastated if the boundaries changed once you bought a house.

 

@C-mac Epping West public school has already shrunkk due to new apartments built. The same question applies to those parents who send them to tuition for selective tests. Don't they know many children aren't suited for selective? It's the psyche that also compels them to buy jn these areas.

 

There's 4 government primary schools in Epping postcode 2121:
Epping Heights
Epping West
Epping North
Epping
So Epping might be ok for now.
I believe near the YMCA more apartments will be built - the open lands there will be turned into housing afaik.

High Schools there's only Arndell (Christian?)
But High School kids who dont go to selective mostly go to Cheltenham Girls and Epping Boys, both with good reputations.

I can see that the Cheltenham Girls catchment area has shrunk a lot in the past and probably will shrink again as people move into the area to get into the school.

Next door over in Eastwood, poor little old Eastwood Public school has very little school ground and they changed the little real grass that was there to fake grass years ago as too many people would walk on it so the grass would just die. It is a very land sparse school. With more apartments coming up everywhere, C-mac you raise a very good question.

Whereas I read in the local paper a year or so ago, Yates Ave Public School in Dundas Valley was now very small - not favoured by parents.

There was Peter Board High School in North Ryde years back and it got closed down. With all the apartments online and soon to be online I believe there's a need to get a High School back in that area. I suppose apartments arent really the first choice of housing of parents with high school kids though.

Some of the Government schools in Parramatta are going to be high rise too, land is high demand at Parramatta for other uses....

Western Sydney Uni are building a vertical campus in Parramatta, I saw the makings of a ~9 storey building going up. But UTS is high rise. No issue with high rise Unis.

With tutoring and Asian heritage parents, it's normal that even year 2 kids get tutored. Some parents send their kindy kids to tuition, but the thought by some is that tuition in kindy is pointless as you don't know what the child is good or bad at at that stage.

And you could turn a kid off from school homework altogether by making them go to tuition....

 

The reality is Asian parents (generalisation) value good education highly because it leads to good jobs (arguable). I have 2 primary school kids and their asian friends have tuition since year 1.

Carlingford West is known to produce kids who go to James ruse. There was selective tests yesterday and those I know in year 6 would all sit for it. Hopefully tuition helps.

 

I dunno, seems like a huge gamble to me. I.e. as a parent you fork out all these $$$ to buy into the right area for a school, then more $$$ for tuition to make your kid perform better and have that better chance of getting into that better school...

... but the kid competes against hundreds of other kids who are also being tutored and forced to study endlessly to the point of perfect-100 scores on everything. Even then, the poor kid might not nab one of those (comparatively few) spots!

Even then, the kid might not do what the parents want. Not every kid who is told 'you need to be a lawyer or a doctor' wants to be a lawyer or a doctor. The aptitude may be there but the will may not be.

In a way its selfish of the parents because they just want to turn their kid into a cashcow so that when the parent is 60, their own child wil fund them through to their 90's etc. By then the parent feels like it is owed to them - because they bought the fancy house and expensive education for their child all those years ago. What a horrible cycle.

Anyway, I'm not a parent so I have no clue. But I know that I'd put my childs happiness ahead of my own, always. I would work hard myself so i could support myself in my old age based on the fruits of my own life's labours, not of my childs. Hence the reason why I'm building my portfolio, to self fund my retirement with zero reliance on a) other humans, or b) the government (which is really just other humans..)

 

A house in nice school catchment is also an investment that can hold value - even if the investor don't have kids yet...

 

Heres article about western sydney Dec 2012, picking up houses for $250k

 

hmmm will be interesting to see effect of change in government/policies in July (upcoming election) on property prices (if any).

 

if you are buying now (anywhere, will you hold off till July??

 

im holding off because of the reason i explained but ALSO because you can see house prices starting to come down in most areas... i think that is a common thought amongst the majority of real estate agents I talk to .. it does not make sense to rush buying a property now does it?

 

If anyone needs suburb or property report pls pm me i have rpdata sybscription