Kingsford Apartments
Kingsford, being a suburb right next to a university where a fifth of its students come from overseas, has a high concentration of low-rise apartment buildings. The majority of them are old 60s red-brick apartments which property developers are now starting to renovate into something a little more modern. For example, there’s a newly renovated complex on Rainbow St where a property developer has bought out the whole building and redone it. Its red-bricks have been painted over in gray. The garden has been landscaped and the balconies have been decluttered (full glass doors, glass balcony guards). The interior looks pretty swish too. Nice, large, well-fitted bathrooms, open-plan kitchens a bit too open for my liking new carpet, new fixtures and built-in wardrobes which don’t have mirrors to cater for the Asian crowd who believe that sleeping in front of a mirror will do bad things to your soul or some nonsense like that. They even throw in a “free” LCD TV for the master bedroom.
Here’s the kicker. Two bedrooms and one carspace will set you back $500k. That’s half a million for a two bedroom, renovated 60s building apartment. Half of the units available have already been sold, so there’s definitely a market out there. About five years ago, the same unrenovated units would probably have sold for half that price. The property market bubble may be bursting, but it’s always relative. Price rises may stall and property values may stagnate, but they rarely ever fall.
2:14pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
I remember hearing of a similar property price bubble in Japan … when someone calculated that the combined asking price of all the apartments for sale in Japan exceeded the previous year’s GDP, the prices took a sharp fall to more reasonable levels.
In Canberra, houses are more or less reasonably priced, but apartments are still horrifically expensive – expect to pay $380-400k for a two bedroom apartment, while you could buy a two bedroom house in the same neighbourhood for ~$320k. Now – I would have thought a house should cost more??
Sooner or later some journo will blow the whistle, and the prices will fall sharply. Long term returns on property in Australia have been around 7%pa above inflation for many years, and I don’t think that is likely to change. Having said that, it’s back in “fashion” to invest in property (unlike 20 years ago), so it might be a while before the prices start declining.