A suburb can show consistent price growth year after year, but nowhere can be labelled "bulletproof": Terry Ryder

Thirty-one years writing about real estate has taught me that nowhere is immune to downturns.

Nowhere.

There are certainly markets that show consistent growth year after year and I call them the "stayers". Many of the places I recommend are stayers.

But "bulletproof"? It doesn't exist.

So a magazine cover story that claimed there are 152 bulletproof places across Australia certainly got my attention. I guess that was the general idea; grab people's attention and sell lots of magazines, never mind accuracy or integrity.

When I looked at the list in Australian Property Investor and saw that it included Moranbah, I knew we were dealing with the usual puffery that property magazines favour to outdo one another.

Moranbah's market is falling so fast, people's heads are spinning. Rentals and yields have halved and its median price has dropped from $750,000 to below $700,000. It has had a fantastic growth record and it will rise again, but bulletproof it ain't.

Then I noticed that the list of the indestructible included four suburbs in Gladstone, another market in serious decline.

Gladstone has an impressive past and a strong future, but it's as susceptible to market dynamics as anywhere else - in this case, an oversupply (vacancies now around 6.5%) generated by overly-zealous developers.

Gladstone had a previous decline around 2009-2010, when the GFC caused a pause in the resources revolution.

It  has shown the kind of volatility common to markets partly or largely dependent on the resources sector and is now into the second market decline in the last five years. It is Australia's No.1 industrial city but it doesn't fit any definition of bulletproof.

In many cases, the list of bulletproof suburbs at the front of the magazine is contradicted by the statistical lists at the back - and that detracts further from the credibility of the front cover flimflam and the magazine that published it.

According to API's stats, Sandhurst in Melbourne has dropped 8% in the 12 months to April. Australian Property Monitors, which provides those stats, records massive drops in the Sandhurst median price in three of the past eight years. If that's bulletproof, I'm looking for a new vest.

There are dozens of similar examples on the API list.

I should stress that I have no criticism of Residex and the list the research company generated. The 152 locations feature many solid markets and roughly half of them have appeared in Hotspotting reports over the past seven years. They're places with good growth records, in many cases.

I also agree with many of the published comments by John Edwards of Residex. He emphasises the importance of investing in places with diversified economies. He notes the rise in prominence of unit markets, something I have been writing about a lot lately.

He also points out, and this is extremely important, that the list includes only one million-dollar suburb and that most fall into the affordable category; "this suggests that it's the lower cost properties that are less likely to suffer correction," Edwards says in the magazine.

In addition, he observes the superior stability of markets in regional centres, compared to capital cities; "they don't have a tendency to have any pronounced growth cycle, hence they're less susceptible to value loss and generally have stable growth," he said.

Wholeheartedly agree.

So the data is not the problem - it's the spin the magazine chose to put on it. I find most people believe what media tells them and they will be entering dangerous territory if they buy in some of the places carelessly labeled as bulletproof.

Terry Ryder is the founder of hotspotting.com.au and he will be discussing the Melbourne property market in detail at the Property Observer webinar on 31 July.