Such gentrification, as we investors like to call it, has coincided with a period of low interest rates, high wages, high employment, national prosperity and economic growth.
Hi ffc
Interesting topic.
I have long been promoting Noble Park to anyone looking to 'get in before the price rises'.
I see the suburb as an absolutely wonderful minestrone of cultures, people from all over the Globe. Walk around Noble Park in the middle of the day and see the colour and vibrancy, and just a short drive away, try and get a parking spot at Springvale! You would swear it was Carnival there, every day!
When I first started in Real Estate, waaaaay back in 1975, I recall driving around to appointments at night (not everybody had phones, and mobile phones hadn't been invented: It was Life on Mars, remember?) and visiting families in the inner city areas, tiny, old, houses jammed in between factories. Often the only English speaking person in the household would be the seven year old child.
These families, through sheer grit and determination, bought houses in Brunswick and Preston or Abbotsford or South Yarra, and after a few years bought another, usually a bit further out, and often bought whole streets of houses or acreage and built mansions (with lots of concrete pillars - and vege patches in square edged vege plots).
Everybody worked.
Everybody saved.
These suburbs were dark at night because everybody was in bed early for an early start in the factories.
Now, the factories are in areas where people need cars to get to work.
Noble Park, Springvale and other colourful, congested areas are the breeding ground for the next generation's affluence.
As people acclimatise to the Australian way of life, and realise that they can buy land, buy houses, build a fortune, create a dynasty, they will do it as all the generations of migrants have done before them.
I come from a family of migrants. The first female in my line was born to settlers in Geelong in 1837. Every male has been a foreigner. Just because I speak like Chipps Rafferty doesn't mean I don't 'remember' what it must have been like for people coming here and starting from scratch.
But what I do know, is that the areas close to where people live when they first get here undergo enormous transformation because of these 'New Australians'. Their energy, their determination, and their sentiment for their first neighbourhood, transforms those neighbourhoods.
Feral neighbourhoods are usually so becuase of low education and low household income earning potention. As time goes by, the education level rises, earnings increase, the neighbourhood gets a few sidewalk cafes, the DINKS start to see it as a 'first home' area, buy and renovate, then comes the 'infill' housing boom, when people are so attached to the neighbourhood but don't want to renovate a 1960s triple fronted wire cut cream brick veneer, and find it's cheaper to knock it down and start again.
But one thing I have noticed: New arrivals spend no money on gardens. The drought hasn't helped, but concrete gardens are not fashionable now, bare dirt is. There aren't even vege gardens, not even lemon trees!
This next wave will build quite differently to the previous Southern European contribution. Apartments and other taller buildings will be the norm. Seriously, as far as the Eastern Suburbs are concerned, I would put my money on Noble Park.
Cheers
Kristine
