The next big thing in property presents sun, sand – and investment opportunities
Why everyone is going bananas for this north coast holiday destination
4 min
F or anyone who has experienced family road trips along the Pacific Highway, The Big Banana at Coffs Harbour is a memorable landmark. When Australia’s first “big thing” was built almost 50 years ago, it literally represented the fruits of the labour for a parochial town sitting halfway between Sydney and Brisbane.
But what a difference half a century makes.
Soon that local icon, now a family amusement park, will be bypassed with a 14km $2.2 billion highway upgrade, transforming the coastal city into a destination ripe for the picking.
Going bananas
The 2021 Census named health care and social assistance as the leading employer in Coffs Harbour followed by retail, education, plus accommodation and food services. These in-demand employment sectors, as well as a significant amount of infrastructure already in the pipeline, continue to attract newcomers to the area.
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Coffs Harbour recently welcomed a $194 million expansion to the local hospital and continues to introduce more carriers to the airport with daily direct flights to Sydney and Melbourne. It has a growing tertiary education campus with TAFE and University of Southern Cross courses, and an international sports stadium that hosts star-studded events.
Culture is also high on the agenda. In June 2022 Hollywood heavyweight Russell Crowe, who owns a farm in nearby Nana Glen, announced his intention to back a $438 million world-class film studio for Coffs Harbour.
Mountains meet the sea
The Coffs Coast is on the land of the Gumbaynggirr people and encompasses a collection of suburbs and townships including Nambucca, Urunga, Bellingen, Sawtell, Coramba, Moonee Beach, Sapphire Beach and Woolgoolga.
Often described as the place “where the mountains meet the sea” the sub tropical region, which is home to 78,759 people (and forecast to hit 100,000 by 2041 according to council estimates), is the meeting point of the Great Dividing Range and the Pacific Ocean. Due to its unique topography, Coffs ticks plenty of coastal boxes, but also offers leafy acreages and hinterland estates with ocean views. However, it’s this landscape which presents challenges for residential development and the supply of new housing.
Slow and steady
Homebuyer demand and prices in greater Coffs Harbour skyrocketed in 2021 but spent much of 2022 slowly declining as interest rates climbed. However, limited supply is likely to prevent significant price falls.
“Based on the current peak in the cash rate expected for early 2023 and a lagged response in the property market, we could see a floor in price falls across Northern NSW lifestyle markets in the second half of this year,” says Eliza Owen, head of residential research Australia at CoreLogic.
According to CoreLogic the median house price in Coffs Harbour is $815,000, although there are some coveted suburbs such as Sapphire Beach to the north with a median of $1.39 million.
“Values [in the Coffs Harbour region] have fallen a relatively mild -5.0 percent from a peak in August,” she says. This follows an upswing of 56.3 percent, so overall values are still up 47.9 percent. While COVID no doubt unlocked some value in Coffs Harbour that couldn’t be realised before remote work was so normalised, there are some headwinds for the purchasing market.”
New kids on the block
A pipeline of investment in Coffs Harbour caught the eye of residential developer Third.i. Late last year the group launched Sable at the Jetty, a medium-density development of 35 apartments.
“Part of the reason we wanted to target Coffs was because we believe there’s an undersupply of the style of apartments we create; a luxury lifestyle, or a larger downsizer product,” says Third.i director of sales marketing, Luke Berry.
“Coffs Harbour ticks so many boxes. I used to holiday there as a kid and I love the region. It’s only going to become more desirable as workers continue to turn to remote working and the ageing population seeks out appropriate areas to retire to.
“Coffs is high on the list for anyone looking at a strategic investment or secure retirement,” he says.
Martin Wells, principal of McGrath Real Estate Coffs Harbour, says despite a slow finish to 2022, the forces of supply and demand kickstarted 2023.
“By mid January we noticed our online buyer inquiries had doubled compared with those softer episodes of last year,” Wells says.
“The supply shortage is still the dominant driver of prices holding and I’d expect they’ll continue to climb again throughout 2023.”
Top end prices, locally considered to be above the $1.5 million dollar mark, have “corrected”. However, Wells suggests the trough could have already passed.
“We’re probably seeing about 5 to 10 percent off the price of top end properties,” he says. “But I think that’s probably the last of it because demand is coming back into that price point.
“Traditionally, around 30 percent of our inquiry might’ve been from Melbourne or Sydney purchasers, now it’s probably closer to 50 per cent.
“So there’s still a large amount of money around.”
David Malvern, regional manager at McDonald Jones Homes says the limited land available meant any price decreases were unlikely to linger.
“If there was a larger supply I’ve no doubt new home sales would increase significantly,” he says.
“Either customers can’t find land, or when they do, often the topography is really not ideal for an affordable home.
“They might find themselves having to spend $100,000 on earthworks just to get a block ready.”
He says while the supply of land is the greatest challenge for buyers in the area today, it ultimately translates to a positive for anyone holding property for the long haul.
“You’ve got such a high demand for housing and a limited supply that if you’re an investor, or looking to move into Coffs Harbour, you’re going to benefit,” Malvern says. “I simply can’t see the market producing the amount of land and housing that’s actually needed to meet demand.”
From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
In the lead-up to the country’s biggest dog show, a third-generation handler prepares a gaggle of premier canines vying for the top prize.
Records keep falling in 2025 as harbourfront, beachfront and blue-chip estates crowd the top of the market.
