Prestige Property: Two Roads, Maleny, QLD

Two Roads is a peerless, multi award-winning masterpiece of grand scale set on 185 acres of the Queensland Sunshine Coast’s hinterland.

Located in the hills behind Maleny, it is the first time the HIA 2016 Queensland Home of the Year has been offered to the market.

Boasting an intense sense of privacy – with views over the Witta and Curramore Ranges – the 15000sqm, 6-bedroom, 4-bathroom, 7-car garage home is a mere seven-minute drive from the heart of Maleny.

Taking its design cues from the opulent retreats found on the South Island of New Zealand, the exterior of the home sees Alpine granite and Buffalo granite used as the prevailing materials.

Inside, the home uses a select palette of polished concrete and stained hardwood flooring alongside New Guinea Rosewood feature ceilings and dark-stained hardwood shiplap cladding.

The kitchen features European appliances and a polished concrete benchtop with a separate concealed butler’s pantry adjacent.

Large glass doors combine the indoors to the outdoors, with the wraparound veranda, alfresco dining area and large pool featured outside.

Throughout the home one can expect a plethora of living and entertaining spaces – including a large games room and commercial sized gym – office, library guest room and temperature-controlled 1000 bottle wine cellar.

Adding elevated appeal to the home is the use of gas fireplaces dotted throughout the home.

Solar panels are used throughout the property to heat the alongside and Envirocycle system and rainwater tanks capable of holding 300,000 litres to ensure the home tracks towards becoming environmentally neutral.

Further, the grounds are privy to a full-size floodlit tennis court with spectator seating, Olympic size dressage area and helicopter landing site.

These features are further coupled with two self-contained luxury eco-cabins and a renovated 3-bedroom manager’s cottage.

Elsewhere on the property is manicured gardens, pastures, native rainforest, kilometres of walking trails, multiple waterfalls and swimming holes.

As a working farm, it currently has 45 head of cattle, five horses and stockyard, sheds and machinery.

There are few properties in Australia like it.

The listing is with Mosaic Property Group’s Deon Calder (+61 400 551 635); POA.

Mosaicpropertygroup.com

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

Prestige Property: Two Roads, Maleny, QLD

A modern hinterland masterpiece offered for the first time.

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents