The best (and worst) performing regional areas for property around Australia

Home values and rents continued to rise across most of Australia’s 50 largest regional markets over the past three months, with median prices and weekly rents at record levels in many areas. Dwelling values across regional Australia as a whole rose by 2.1 percent over the three months to April, according to CoreLogic’s latest quarterly regional market update. This was the fastest rate of growth in nearly two years and outpaced the capital cities, which rose by 1.7 percent.

“After falling 5.8 percent between May 2022 and January 2023, regional home values have seen a slower recovery compared to capital city values but have now regained the losses from the downturn to reach a new record high,” said CoreLogic economist, Kaytlin Ezzy. Many regional markets experienced runaway price growth during the pandemic as thousands of people left the cities. Many of the markets that experienced the greatest growth went on to experience the largest corrections.

While regional values and rents overall are at a record high, only 19 of the 50 regions analysed have returned or surpassed their record medians at this point in the recovery. The best performing areas were mostly in Western Australia and Queensland, while the worst performers were on the NSW coast and southern highlands, and in Victoria. In terms of weekly rents, 37 of the 50 regions are at record highs and 47 recorded increases in rents over the past three months.

“Housing affordability has continued to deteriorate through the start of 2024 for tenants and prospective home buyers alike. The outlook for regional housing markets will heavily depend on demographic trends, housing supply, localised economic drivers and the outlook for interest rates,” Ms Ezzy said.

Here is a summary of 10 regional markets, incorporating some of the strongest and weakest areas.

Batemans Bay, NSW

The south coast town recorded the highest increase in weekly rents over the quarter. Rents rose 6 percent to a median $570 per week. Home values rose 0.4 percent over the quarter to $743,712. Vendors are being forced to discount their original selling prices in Batemans Bay more than any other regional area. The average rate of discounting is 6.5 percent. Over the past five years, home values have risen 47.4 percent and rents have increased by 34.8 percent.

Ballina, NSW

Home values remain 15.9 percent below their April 2022 peak, which is the largest decline among the 50 regional markets at present. The median home value rose 1.1 percent over the quarter to $957,767. Weekly rents increased by 1.7 percent to a median $740 per week. Over the past five years, the median home price has soared 53.9 percent and weekly rents have lifted 35.5 percent.

Ballarat, VIC

Ballarat experienced the largest decline in home values over the three months to April. The median home price fell 2 percent to $541,815. Weekly rents increased by 0.4 percent to a median $425 per week. Over the past five years, the median home price has increased 30.9 percent and weekly rents have risen 22.3 percent.

Shepparton – Mooroopna, VIC

Home values rose 1.3 percent over the quarter to $456,331. Weekly rents increased by 1.2 percent to a median $472 per week. Over the past five years, the median home price has lifted 49.5 percent and weekly rents have accelerated 39 percent.

Geraldton, WA

Geraldton recorded the highest quarterly growth in home values of all 50 regions, up 8.8 percent to $394,251. Weekly rents increased by 3.6 percent to a median $475 per week. The rental yield is among the highest of the 50 regions at 6.2 percent. Over the past five years, the median home price has risen 61.4 percent and weekly rents have increased 54.6 percent.

Bunbury, WA

Bunbury recorded the fastest average selling time over the quarter at 14 days. It also had the second highest growth in weekly rents at 4.7% to a median $627 per week. Rents have been rising strongly for an extended period, with Bunbury recording the largest annual rise in rents at 16.4%. Home values rose 6.4 percent over the quarter to $576,979. Over the past five years, the median home price has leapt 68.3 percent and weekly rents have increased by 65.3 percent.

Busselton, WA

Busselton had the second-highest quarterly growth in home values of all 50 regions, up 7.7 percent to a median $812,050. It also recorded the second fastest selling times of the 50 regions at an average 16 days. Weekly rents increased by 2.8 percent to a median $723 per week. Over the past five years, the median home price has leapt 68 percent and weekly rents have soared 60.3 percent.

Sunshine Coast, QLD

Home values rose 3.2 percent over the quarter to $1,019,013. Weekly rents increased by 4.4 percent to a median $766 per week. Over the past five years, the median home price has grown strongly by 69.1 percent and weekly rents have lifted 46.8 percent.

Coastline at Dicky Beach in Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, Australia

Rockhampton, QLD

Rockhampton is a very affordable market but strong demand amid high interest rates is seeing home values lift at a rapid rate. Home values rose 5.1 percent over the quarter to a median $442,962. Weekly rents rose by 2.4 percent to a median $498 per week. Over the past five years, the median home price has skyrocketed 60.1 percent and weekly rents have charged 48 percent higher.

Launceston, TAS

Home values in Launceston rose 3.6 percent over the quarter to $534,227. Weekly rents increased by 2 percent to a median $491 per week. Over the past five years, the median home price has risen 56.7 percent and weekly rents have accelerated 33.5 percent.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.