A house or an apartment?

蓝色热带鱼

Guest blogger Monique Sasson Wakelin is a director of Wakelin Property Advisory, an independent buyers agent.

For more than 20 years, I have been advising clients on how to invest in residential property. Over that time, the one question that comes up more than any other is, “Wouldn’t a house with a backyard make a better investment than a one bedroom apartment?”
The answer is never a simple “yes” or “no”, but rather “it depends” - it depends on the property, it depends on your budget and it depends on the location.

Advertisement: Story continues below The real trick is to ensure that your target property will deliver the highest capital growth. With a budget of $800,000 or more for a city property, a house is usually the better option. At $700,000 - $800,000, depending on the location, either option will work. Under $700,000, an apartment is usually a better investment.

Many first time investors assume that houses are always better as investments as they have more accommodation and land. This may have been true once, but as a growing number of Australians have come to prefer living closer to the centre of town, the patterns of growth in property values has changed.

Apartment owners have been one of the greatest beneficiaries of this trend. And we can see this in the figures published by Real Estate Institutes in three states. Over the last five years, the median price for a Brisbane apartment grew by 42.5 per cent while houses grew by 38.2 per cent. In Melbourne, prices growth for houses and apartments was almost dead even at 55.3 per cent and 54.4 per cent respectively.

In Sydney over the last five years, the median price house growth was 30.1 per cent, well ahead of non-strata properties, mainly apartments, which grew by just 10.5 per cent. But when we look at inner Sydney, units grew by 33.6 per cent. It’s this inner suburban performance which points to the reasons why apartments can perform as well as a house – and in some instances, even better.

As more people choose to live in inner precincts, closer to work and the attractions of urban life, the land that inner urban properties sit on has become increasingly valuable. Apartments are most likely to be built in the inner urban areas - they take up a higher share of the land there than anywhere else. Owners of apartments are sharing in the rising value of the land that their buildings stand on - providing their complex has fewer than 25 apartments and the location is second to none. Apartment investors therefore benefit from the appreciating land values even though they don’t have a direct landholding.

Of course, houses in the inner suburbs have benefited from that growth too, but an ever increasing proportion of these houses now cost $1 million or more, making them less affordable for the majority of investors. During periods of higher interest rates rises or jitters in the financial markets, it’s the $1 million-plus market that tends to be the most affected and this can hold down the performance of some inner-suburban houses.

Not all inner-urban apartments share in the growth, however. Poorly located or poorly designed apartments miss out. High rise apartments often miss out too, primarily the result of having hundreds of units on one site. This leaves a small amount of land value for each owner - sometimes just 10 per cent or even less of the purchase price.

But well-positioned established apartments in low-rise, inner urban complexes can be as strong an investment proposition as any other in the Australian property market.

蓝色热带鱼

With a budget of $800,000 or more for a city property, a house is usually the better option. At $700,000 - $800,000, depending on the location, either option will work. Under $700,000, an apartment is usually a better investment.

80万以上预算，house比较好；
70-80万预算，house/apt都有机会；
70万以下预算，apt机会大些