With Melbourne’s population growth and infrastructure – not to mention their governance and management – hitting the news cycle in a big way lately, it’s perhaps time to pull back from the hullabaloo and take stock.
The Melbourne apartment sector remains strong, continuing its traditional strength of supplying the city with readily-available and diverse property offerings for buyers of all stripes.
Melbourne offers a fully stocked supply of new homes. It provides a relatively affordable market within reach of most middle-class families and investors, and an enviable social and cultural life complementing its proven track record on liveability. It is indeed a potent and attractive calling card.
Melbourne remains focused around developing its city core, with postcode 3000, Southbank, and South Melbourne dominating apartment supply across the metro area. Together, these three suburbs promise around 40,000 new apartments, currently at various stages of the development process.
The NEICs (National Employment and Innovation Clusters) are already busy shaping the strategic direction of Melbourne to spread employment and opportunity around the middle and outer metropolitan rings. The NEICs have the scale to become economically and socially self-sustaining. In turn, changes to strategic planning have opened up new supplies of apartments around these nodes.
You can view interactive residential construction stats in our Data Room.
Places like Box Hill and Doncaster are two suburbs in the top 10 which demonstrate this strategic re-focus. Between them, around 10,000 new apartments are in the development pipeline. Continuing the trend, Brunswick, Moonee Ponds and Coburg also break with the traditional inner-Melbourne focus, featuring in the top 20 of new apartment supply.
Other places in middle-ring Melbourne with over 1000 dwellings include Carnegie (1602), Essendon (1527), Northcote (1407) and Maribyrnong (1279), reinforcing this trend.
In fact, this strategy is perhaps seeing its logical resolution with this week’s announcement of a long-range, $50 billion vision for a suburban orbital rail line linking perpendicularly Melbourne’s radial train network and middle-ring metropolitan centres without the need to go through the city centre. Putting aside the pre-election timing of this announcement, it is certainly a bold vision and one that firmly writes into the transport landscape the strategic use of middle ring nodes.
Unlike the existing orbital motorway network, an orbital train line has the advantage of being able to directly plug into social, employment, and residential centres without the large land space requirements of arterial roads and motorways and their inability to cope with concentrated peak loads. Melbourne would unlock the potential of these middle ring nodes by employing a mass-transit line that finally enables these orbital linkages and allows a more viable re-focusing away from the city core.
The table below demonstrates that Melbourne has a good start on continuing its success with meeting the demands of population growth and modern lifestyles.
The number of dwellings for each suburb in the table are sourced from the Urban.com.au property database and include projects across all stages of the development process – Planning Assessment, Approved, Registration & Sales, and Under Construction.
Click on a suburb name to view a summary of the development pipeline for each region:
|
Rank |
Suburb |
Number of Dwellings |
|
1 |
20,035 |
|
|
2 |
16,015 |
|
|
3 |
6,573 |
|
|
4 |
6,526 |
|
|
5 |
6,276 |
|
|
6 |
5,645 |
|
|
7 |
4,980 |
|
|
8 |
4,402 |
|
|
9 |
4,124 |
|
|
10 |
3,808 |
|
|
11 |
3,369 |
|
|
12 |
3,044 |
|
|
13 |
2,828 |
|
|
14 |
2,793 |
|
|
15 |
2,749 |
|
|
16 |
2,668 |
|
|
17 |
2,618 |
|
|
18 |
2,493 |
|
|
19 |
1,792 |
|
|
20 |
1,757 |