Tasmanian Real Estate Sets New Record
The state’s median house price is at a record level.
The state’s median house price is at a record level.
Launceston has seen median house prices increase by 23.8% in the past year – now up to $470,000, according to the latest data from the Real Estate Institute of Tasmania (REIT).
The REIT’s quarterly report noted a record 4.46 billion in real estate sales in Tasmania over the past 12 months until September.
Sales in 2021 lifted by 15.8% on the previous year with values up 18.7%.
Across the state, the median price for a Tasmanian home in September was $520,000 – an increase of 7.4% over 12 months.
According to REIT, the lift in property prices has lowered investment levels. Mainland buyer numbers were up to 1653 from 1051 last year but only represented 18.1% of sales.
Investor levels tell a similar story with sales to investors up to 36.5% compares to last year however represented 19% of all sales.
Real Estate Institute of Tasmania president Michael Walsh said strong buyer demand and a severe lack of supply was being experienced by each Australian capital city.
“We clearly need to find avenues to release the pressure that has been placed on the rental and sales markets by seeking the government’s help to look for ways to expediently create more rental properties and building more established homes for sale,” said Mr Walsh,
With investor levels down, a rise in pressure on rental asking prices has been felt across the Tasmanian market. The quarterly report indicates rental vacancy rates are between 0.8 to 1.2 % across the state.
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’