When Nathan Booth and Rachel Yanner, both 28, decided to move from Melbourne to Ballarat at the end of 2023, the couple joined a stream of people relocating to Victoria’s third-largest city.
For several years Booth had been travelling against the commuter tide going from Melbourne to an IT job in Ballarat. Then along came the COVID-19 lockdowns, and he joined a seismic shift of people inspired to embrace rural and regional life.
Ballarat was one of the hot spots, the population climbing by almost 6,500 between 2020 and 2023, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. And the Ballarat Housing Strategy 2023-2041 released last month forecasts it will grow by another 55,000 residents to hit 170,000. This would represent a rise of over 32 per cent in 20 years.
It’s not hard to see the attraction, says Mayor Des Hudson, who proudly spruiks Ballarat as “the best regional city in Australia”.* It’s all about liveability that can cater to a range of lifestyles and life stages. “We like to think that [it] has a little bit of everything to offer.”
For Nalita Abraham and her family of four, who made the move down from Newcastle, Ballarat ticked the box for education, healthcare and social needs.
The family are keen members of the live action role-playing community, where participants dress up as medieval characters. Ballarat boasts one of the most active of these communities in the state, Abraham says. Her husband has also secured a job in the medieval scene at Kryal Castle.
Ballarat’s comparative affordability in the midst of a national housing crisis also has powerful appeal. The region had the lowest annual growth rate in the country in the past year, -5.7% according to the latest national regional data from property analyst CoreLogic. This presents an opportunity for aspiring homebuyers, says local real estate agent Robert Cunningham, director at Doepel, Lilley and Taylor.
When they went shopping for a home in October 2023, Booth and Yanner had a maximum budget of $700,000. They had been renting in the Melbourne suburb of Eaglemont, where the median house price was $2.29 million. But the Ballarat Central median when they bought in October 2023 was $607,500 – comfortably within their range.
Abraham and her family also realised their dream of home ownership, buying in one of the newer neighbourhoods in the western growth area. “We found some great schools. Very happy now and settled.”
Longer term Victorian Government data tracking Ballarat Central shows median prices trending down since 2021 after climbing 126% between 2012 and 2021.
Cunningham attributes recent falls in part to a correction to the spike during Victoria’s lockdowns. “At the moment I would say we’re in a slow market – a buyer’s market for want of a better word.”
Rents in the region are also among the most affordable in the country at a median of $425 per week, even after creeping up 2% over the past year, according to the CoreLogic data.
But that isn’t the whole story, with some pockets trending higher. Data from the REA Group shows a steady increase to the weekly rental prices of houses in Ballarat Central. Between 2018 and 2023, the median rose 23 per cent, an increase of $75 a week.
Despite Ballarat’s comparative affordability for both buyers and renters, high property prices continue to drive access issues.
“People that used to be able to buy their first homes by the age of 30 are still renting. So they’re putting more pressure on vacancies,” says Emma Dawson, executive director at the public policy think tank Per Capita, which runs the Centre for Equitable Housing.
“You’ve got more people competing for rental properties, both because there’s a lack of subsidised housing and because young families that would normally be getting out of private rentals are staying in rentals for longer.”
“The real cause of the housing crisis across the country is the lack of investment in social housing,” says Dawson. “If we have an adequate supply of government subsidised housing, then that takes a lot of pressure off the private rental market.”
* City of Ballarat interviews for this article were conducted prior to the local government election caretaker period
This is part of Building Ballarat, a reporting project by the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne co-published with the Ballarat Courier.