The regional towns where house prices have skyrocketed

When Kingscliff resident Anna Shannon goes for a walk before work, it’s by the ocean at sunrise – a ritual that felt impossible if she hadn’t moved there from Sydney.

“Previously, that was a special thing to do on holiday, but now it can be part of my day,” says Shannon, who departed the suburb of Ryde and bought with her husband, Iain, in the NSW Northern Rivers coastal town more than three years ago, seeking a better work-life balance.

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“My dream was to live near the ocean, and that dream was dead and buried in Sydney, with certainly no prospects of ever living near the beach without a lotto win,” she says. “I still feel like pinching myself that I live here.”

Shannon built a flexible business during the pandemic – she is the chief executive of the online platform Travel Agent Finder – which helped enable the move to a place with less traffic, more community connection, more time for yoga and improved health. All “small moments of pure joy”.

It also placed the couple in one of Australia’s most desirable regional lifestyle markets. The median house price in the Tweed region, which includes Kingscliff, has risen 73.3 per cent over five years to $1.265 million. “Everyone thought we were crazy, but we just felt so strongly about it,” Shannon says. “We took the chance.”

They are not alone.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, regional Australia has evolved from a cheap escape into a more complex landscape. The highest-performing regions for median house prices over the past five years, according to Domain’s March House Price Report, fall into two camps: historically affordable LGAs that have seen explosive growth, and premium, liveability-led markets. 

The national top 20 for five-year median house price growth is dominated by Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. Former lower-valued markets have risen the most. The top spot is Mount Barker in SA’s Adelaide Hills, which surged by 237 per cent to $803,000, followed by the SA tourist destination of Coorong (up 174.2 per cent to $460,000) and Collie in southwest WA, an agriculture and coal-production area (up 163.4 per cent to $460,000).

In higher-end markets, led by Augusta Margaret River wine country in WA (up 129.2 per cent to $1.1 million), medians are on par with metro areas. Domain chief residential economist Dr Nicola Powell says buyers chasing quality of life are drawn by the comparative bang for buck. “If you are looking like-for-like on price point in a city versus regional, people do it because they want to get greater value for money.”

In NSW, the outback mining town of Broken Hill recorded the greatest growth, doubling to $250,000, followed by Cessnock at the gateway to the Hunter Valley (up 96.1 per cent to $799,000) and Dungog on the Mid North Coast (up 95.4 per cent to $785,000). In Victoria, the biggest gains were in Hindmarsh in the state’s west (up 101.8 per cent to $277,500), ahead of Yarriambiack in the north-west (up 91.3 per cent to $265,000) and Gannawarra on the Murray River (up 75.5 per cent to $412,500).

Rental prices nationally have also risen sharply. A top-20 snapshot shows a mix of resource, agricultural and lifestyle regions across Western Australia, NSW, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria increased 13 per cent to 31 per cent over the past 12 months.

The mining area of Karratha in Western Australia’s Pilbara region experienced the most annual rental growth, now at $1375 per week (up 31 per cent), reflecting a worker influx, followed by the wine and produce hub of the Yass Valley in NSW ($700, up 27.3 per cent) and farming area of Naracoorte Lucindale in South Australia ($410, up 20.6 per cent).

Capital-to-regional migration accounted for 11.6 per cent of all relocations in the three months to December 2025, according to the Regional Australia Institute Regional Movers Index, which was the most since the end of 2022. The average regional mortgage is $400,000 compared with $507,000 for metro borrowers, CommBank revealed in the report.

However, Powell says regional markets are no longer defined by affordability alone. “For decades, regional Australia offered a really simple value proposition – more space, lower prices and a lifestyle upgrade without the financial strain,” she says. “This isn’t a short-term spike, it’s a complete step-change in how much you have to pay to live in some of these markets.”

KPMG director of planning and infrastructure economics Terry Rawnsley says city migration and remote working have played a role. “If someone comes from a city and their default is 20 to 30 per cent of income going towards a mortgage, that’s probably part of this repricing we’ve seen,” he says, noting some communities that hadn’t seen population growth for 10 or 20 years were caught “unawares” by the increased demand.

However, Rawnsley cautions that some of it may be short-lived. “There’s probably, in some markets, a bit of froth in the growth due to lower interest rates that we had for a brief period,” he says.

Local councils are responding through state government funding to help fast-track building approvals and unlock supply.

Maiy Azize, spokesperson for housing crisis campaign group Everybody’s Home, says local governments still lack the resources to provide enough supply. Meanwhile, soaring prices in once inexpensive towns have outpaced regional wages. “There’s this kind of fantasy that housing is more affordable in regional areas, but most people know that isn’t true,” she says.

For locals on the margins, the tension shows in everyday trade-offs. “People just make more accommodations, they skip meals and doctor’s appointments, but they don’t skip the rent,” Azize says.