The dream’s alive

By Callan Date
DOVETON is, on average, the cheapest place in metropolitan Melbourne to buy a house.
With the median price of a Doveton property at $175,000, the area is providing some relief for people looking to enter the property market at the lower price range.
The State Government publication, A Guide to Property Values 2006, was released last week by Planning Minister Justin Madden.
The report provided a summary of sales activity for every local government area in Victoria for the 2006 calendar year.
Other suburbs to rank in the cheaper price range included Melton South ($175,000 avearge), Frankston North ($177,000), Millgrove ($177,500) and Longwarry ($190,000). But the low price range doesn’t mean there are no gems to be found among in the Doveton area.
A Grant’s Estate Agents official said they recently sold a Rose Drive property for $250,000. “The demand is quite high. We get a lot of first home owners interested in buying in the area,” she said.
She said Doveton was an up and coming area that had large blocks and had long shaken off its tag of being a downtrodden housing commission area.
Botanical Grove, Floriana Drive and Kingfisher Drive were highly sought after areas, she said.
“Grant’s Estate Agents have sold about 10 properties in Doveton over the last month. We can’t even get the boards up before we get inquiries about the houses,” she said.
Mr Madden said that across Victoria, the annual rise in median house sale prices had slowed from the 18.7 per cent peak in 2002 and 14.9 per cent in 2003 to 7.3 per cent in 2004 and 6 per cent in 2006.
“The price of vacant land in the Melbourne area rose by just 1.5 per cent in 2006, showing the success of the Bracks Government’s land release policies,” Mr Madden said.
“Victoria’s property market is returning to more sustainable levels of growth, which is good news for first homebuyers,” Mr Madden said.
The Housing Industry Association’s latest Land Monitor found that land supply in Melbourne was generally in balance with demand.
Melbourne suburbs with the highest median prices included Toorak at $2.077 million; Canterbury and Brighton at $1.2 million; and East Melbourne and Kooyong at $1.15 million.