From the main headline on The Age website this afternoon; "
Is panic buying sweeping our property market?"
I'll take her up on that; she is indeed old-fashioned to struggle with accepting half a million dollars as a low amount.
The journo might seem old fashioned, but she also seems to have the facts on her side.
The median house price for Melbourne is about $470k. $500k is above this. So by definition it is quite impossible for it to be considered low-end, when taken for Melbourne as a whole.
Subject to patterns of distribution, where there is a median of $500k, one might consider a price of around $300k low end and maybe $800k high end. Or even better, one might describe anything in the bottom 25th percentile as 'low end' and in the top 25% as 'high end'. The rest is somewhere around the middle - give or take a couple of hundred thousand.
Then read on and note the article is about a certain subset of property - inner suburban within 10km of the CBD. This accounts for a diminishing minority of suburban property and the population. But their average prices are high and $500k may indeed be entry level in many of them for anything other than a small unit.
The average Age reader or ABC radio listener lives (or is assumed to live) in the inner suburbs. If they don't then it's the aspiration. They are assumed to have $100k+ incomes (another minority, though the high earner/high spender's false Aussie egalitarianism dismisses this as 'only a battler income'). In terms of housing preference and suburb location they are assumed to be clones or Monique Wakelin (who regards $600k as 'low end' for a house that will appreciate).
Journalists and the degreed people who read the Age tend to be heavily represented in the inner suburbs (though often as tenants or house sharers rather than owners) and talk to inner suburban REAs and buyers agents a lot. Hence 'inner suburban' is considered 'normal', even though it's maybe 20% of the state population.
Such people may know that there are many houses and units available for under about $350k (and even that by definition 50% must be under $470k as that's the median) but because of their further out location they make the lifestyle decision to stay inner and rent rather than move out to an 'inferior' location.
However they tend to write (and complain about affordability) on the basis of properties around where they rent, rather than considering where they can afford to buy. The issue is not that they can't afford to buy, but they have rigid criteria that is set so high that it prevents purchase.
