Best opportunities for property investors will be in regional areas with mining influence in 2013: Terry Ryder

The median house price in the remote Queensland regional town of Cloncurry rose 35% in the past 12 months. In the same period, the median house price in the upmarket Sydney suburbs of Double Bay fell 35%.

That is the black and white of property markets around Australia. In between, across the thousands of suburbs and towns in this country, have been many different shades of grey.

Some markets have boomed, some have grown moderately, some have stagnated, some have gone a little backwards and some have gone into reverse rapidly.

Those at the positive end of the growth scale are overwhelmingly in regional areas with some influence from the resources sector. Those at the negative end are mostly upmarket suburbs in capital cities.

The simple message in this? There’s no such animal as “the Australian property market”.

Next time you hear an analyst discussing what will happen in the Australian property market next year, you can assume you’re listening to a charlatan. There are surprisingly large numbers of them getting airplay.

People keep asking me what will happen next year in the property market, and I keep asking them which market they’re referring to. There are dozens of different answers I could give, depending on location and market segment.