LOOKING UP: Robbie Palmer of Raine & Horne agrees that Mudgee has great growth potential.
Real estate agent Robbie Palmer agrees with the latest report positioning Mudgee as one of Australia’s most rewarding real estate investments.
The Best Rent Report from Onthehouse.com.au ranks Mudgee 31st on a list of Australia’s best suburbs for investment, with strong rental returns and seven per cent average annual growth expected over the next five years.
“Mudgee’s just a place where people want to stay,” said Mr Palmer, of Mudgee’s Raine & Horne.
While many productive centres, particularly those focused on mining, experience strongly contrasted periods of population growth and loss, Mr Palmer said Mudgee’s graphed growth was more “like a set of steps”, with a period of growth followed by a stable plateau before another period of growth continues the pattern.
“Good long-term growth is a steady growth,” he said.
He said this was because people who spent any time in Mudgee during a period of growth tended to go on to buy property and stay.
Mr Palmer contrasted this to other major central west cities shown in the Best Rent Report, which displayed strong rental returns but low long-term growth, as people came and went with the cycle of prosperity.
“It’s a good place to bring up children, it’s a good place to live – people tend to come back,” he said, noting that many former locals returned to settle in the region.
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“I tell people Mudgee’s got a big rubber band on it.”
Mr Palmer said Mudgee was still attractive to investors, as developments such as Caerleon showed, but it was important for infrastructure to keep up with the growth.
“It’s a good size, but for its size – when you compare it to other towns – the facilities and the infrastructure we have are very strong,” he said.
“When a town grows, that infrastructure doesn’t necessarily get to grow at the same rate.”
Mr Palmer said the loss of the planned National Broadband Network connection was one thing that hurt the town’s appeal for investors and new residents, and securing the network would be his first priority if he represented the council.
He said the proposed network would have made Mudgee the perfect base for professionals such as ad executives and accounts officers who could do their work online if they had a high-speed connection.
“That would be such a big boost to the town; that would give us such an advantage,” he said, noting that it would be particularly advantageous if Mudgee had the National Broadband Network and Dubbo, Bathurst and Orange did not.
He said the town had weathered what proved to be unsustainable growth in 2012, when rents were unaffordable for many and demand vastly outweighed the number of vacancies.
There was a time, he said, when young professionals would come to town and would move on because they couldn’t afford to establish themselves in Mudgee.
While he said local rents were still high compared to some centres, the situation had stabilised and vacancies existed. Mr Palmer said the situation still needed to be monitored, and commended council for taking action to encourage the development of affordable housing.
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