The booming Sydney and Melbourne residential markets kept Australia's two largest cities in Knight Frank's global ranking of top-10 luxury residen
Melbourne is benefiting from growing demand by tech employers, the Knight Frank report says.
The booming Sydney and Melbourne residential markets kept Australia’s two largest cities in Knight Frank’s global ranking of top-10 luxury residential locations.
The 10.7 per cent growth seen over the past 12 months in Sydney’s top-end homes and the 8.6 per cent of Melbourne put both cities well below the leading destinations Guangzhou (36.2 per cent), Beijing (22.9 per cent) and Toronto (22.2 per cent), but showed the two were retaining their value as safe-haven destinations, Knight Frank’s head of residential research for Australia Michelle Ciesielski said.
“Although the world is in a state of political and economic flux at present, inevitably we are seeing a degree of safe-haven investment flows into luxury property markets – including Sydney and Melbourne,” Ms Ciesielski said.
In comparison with Knight Frank’s last ranking for the December quarter Melbourne’s annual pace of growth slowed from 8.8 per cent and it slipped one place into ninth. Sydney picked up from 9.3 per cent and seventh place into sixth.
But Ms Ciesielski said Melbourne ranked as a tech hub, in contrast to Sydney’s financial hub and that tech cities were generally performing better as the growing range of tech-based employers sought them out as locations in which to employ people.
“Companies from all over the world, including numerous technology companies, have celebrated success in Melbourne emerging as a global city,” she said.
“Amazon, Facebook and LinkedIn are among the latest global brands to lease space in the Melbourne central business district, and are part of a wave of technology companies seeking office space in the city.”
The prime index corresponds to the top 5 per cent of the housing market in each city.
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