Luxury Homes Continue To Jump In Sales And Price Growth
Prices rose 9.1% across the country in the third quarter of 2021, with Sydney registering the biggest gains.
Prices rose 9.1% across the country in the third quarter of 2021, with Sydney registering the biggest gains.
Australia’s major cities continue to see robust growth in the luxury residential market, according to a report from Knight Frank released Tuesday.
There were 1,971 prime sales—the top 5% of homes in a market—recorded in the third quarter of 2021, a 119% rise compared to the same time in 2020, according to data from the estate agency. The sales number is the second-highest on record.
Australia’s Gold Coast, an area south of Brisbane on the country’s east coast, saw the biggest spike in sales in the third quarter, up 156% annually, followed by Brisbane itself, where sales jumped 135%, according to the report.
In addition, the average number of days a prime property stayed on the market in Australia was 105 in the third quarter, down from 114 days during the second quarter.
Meanwhile, prices for luxury properties across the country rose 9.1% year over year in the third quarter, the figures show. Quarter over quarter, prime prices ticked up 1.5%.
“Australia’s prime annual growth was led by Sydney (10.7%), Gold Coast (10.5%) and Perth (10.4%),” according to the report. “Brisbane followed (8.4%), then Melbourne (6.5%).”
Prices are expected to have grown as much as 11% by the end of 2021, and another 8% in 2022, the report said.
Rents have also increased across Australia, and the country saw a 5.2% year-over-year increase in rates in the third quarter, the data showed. Perth saw the largest growth, registering an annual jump of 11.8% between June and September.
Reprinted by permission of Mansion Global, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: January 18, 2022.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’