PROPERTY prices in Bathurst are likely to continue to rise and available houses for rent will remain rare, according to the man at the head of the Real Estate Institute of NSW.
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REINSW chief executive Tim McKibbin and president Leanne Pilkington were in Bathurst last week as part of a roadshow providing an update on what is happening in the industry.
Mr McKibbin said the median house price in Bathurst was $465,000 last December, up 5.7 per cent over the previous year, and the number of real estate transactions in the area over the same period was up 22.2pc.
In an indication of the strength of the local market, a five-bedroom, three-bathroom historic home in Bentinck Street set a record for the highest known sales price for Bathurst CBD property when it sold for $1.24 million recently.
It was the third time the record had been broken in the past 12 months.
Mr McKibbin said the boom in Bathurst looked likely to roll on due to the lack of properties for sale and the number of people moving from Sydney now they have realised they can do their jobs from home.
"It was no secret that living in a regional centre was better than living in a city where you had traffic and all the rest of it, so people are now moving here," he said.
"And I think places like Bathurst are going to continue, in particular, to be under pressure, as opposed to places further afield from Sydney.
"You can commute from Bathurst once a fortnight, let's say. You couldn't do it every day, but once a fortnight, you could commute into Sydney to have your meetings and do whatever you had to do.
"It would obviously be a bit of a journey, but you wouldn't mind doing it if you could have the benefit of living in a regional centre like Bathurst.
"So, consequently, I think you'll continue to see, during 2021, continued pressure on the available property in the area."
The lack of available property was making life difficult for agents, he said.
"There are three basic needs - there's food, there's water and there's shelter," he said.
He said agents are being put under "some stress, having to respond to consumers who are quite desperate to acquire a property".
Mr McKibbin said a booming market wasn't being predicted 12 months ago.
"I don't think anybody saw that coming. In fact, a lot of the predictions we had this time last year was that the market was going to collapse. It was all going to be dreadful.
"As we know, that's not the case. It went very much in the opposite direction."
Wider or higher? Or a bit of both?
THE only answer to a lack of property in the Bathurst market, which is putting pressure on sale and rent prices, is providing more housing, according to Real Estate Institute of NSW chief executive Tim McKibbin.
But he acknowledges regional cities don't all want to grow outwards.
"There are a multitude of answers," he said. "There isn't a single one-size-fits-all."
Higher density living will provide the answer for some cities, he said, but it will need to be high quality.
And he said the lifestyle block remained appealing for people moving to places such as Bathurst.
"Unfortunately, property isn't like baked beans in a supermarket, where all of a sudden there's none on the shelf, so you put an order in and then they all turn up," he said.
"It takes two years to bring property to market.
"To manoeuvre its way through the planning system is extremely difficult and costly."