Square metre rates for Melbourne's $2 million plus market: Secret Agent

Square metre rates for Melbourne's $2 million plus market: Secret Agent
Jonathan ChancellorFebruary 6, 2021

GUEST OBSERVER

Earlier this month, Secret Agent released our findings on the price per square metre of apartments in the secondary market.

Now we look closely at apartments in the upper tier of Melbourne property, exclusively those that have sold for above $2 million.

Each floor plan was manually measured for its internal habitable space, and the final measurement excluded external walls or structural elements, outdoor space, car spaces and storage cages. Sales were included only if a price and scaled floor plan were available. 

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Key findings:

This study included 12 penthouses, which are typical assets in the top end of the market.

More than half of the sampled apartments have a North-facing aspect, balcony or terrace. This is the most desirable orientation for optimum natural light and passive heating. 

Apartments in the $2million plus market were 59 percent more expensive on a per square metre basis than the rest of the market (below $2million).

On average, 3 bedroom apartments sold at a higher cost per square metre than 4 bedroom apartments (Table 2).

5 of the apartments were located in period or Art Deco buildings, while the rest were constructed from the 1990s onwards. Most of these newly built apartments were designed by renown architects such as Fender Katsalidis, Robin Boyd, Woods Bagot, Ashton Raggatt McDougall, Bates Smart, or boutique developers such as Neometro. For this study, 32 apartments sold between the 1st of May 2015 to 31st of May 2016 were analysed.

The average sale price for these apartments was $2,571,469. The sample mostly consisted of apartments from the central, inner East and inner South of Melbourne. The average price per square metre for $2million plus apartments was $13,653. The results by suburb are shown in Table 1.

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While the average size of apartments below $2million does not appear to deviate much (between 61sqm and 80sqm in sampled suburbs), this does not seem to be the case for the top end of the market. Apartments in the central region (Melbourne, Southbank, Docklands) are on average bigger than the inner East and inner South apartments. 

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 For more information, click here.

Jonathan Chancellor

Jonathan Chancellor is one of Australia's most respected property journalists, having been at the top of the game since the early 1980s. Jonathan co-founded the property industry website Property Observer and has written for national and international publications.

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