This has been a very interesting and informative thread. Thanks to all contributors.
I am a new member and a little background of myself, I recently started a job as a property sales consultant.
My company work under a real estate license and has a division that deals with established properties, however what I mainly do is assisting prospective foreign investors in selecting an investment property from a pool of projects (almost 80% of the new developments in CBD and inner suburbs, excluding the exclusive developers, such as Central Equity and Brady).
To clarify the FIRB regulation, any foreigners can only buy new dwellings and the definiton is: A dwelling that has not been previously sold by the developer and has not been previously occupied (such as, by tenants) for more than 12 months.
My opinion is to never buy from the developer directly or their exclusive agents, because what happens most of the time is that they will be biased to push their own projects, and they have all the reasons to do so. My company also gets paid by the developers when we sell, however we are not affiliated to any of them, so there are no incentives for us to push the not-so-good projects and risk losing a long-term client.
We sell UWS, and it has been received very positively overseas. To share you some data, Madison (Tower 2 of UWS) has been sold 99% (literally only one unit left) and Midtown (Tower 3 of UWS) has been sold about 95%, leaving only 8 low level units available, and yet there would be tower 4 that would be the tallest among all.
I think the underlying reason to the success of UWS is its price point and scale of project. Tower 2 was priced at
$6,272/m2 for a 75 m2 (2 x 2). It is cheap! Especially compared to other projects like Eporo, Fulton Lane, Vision (starting at $9000/m2 plus). The scale of UWS also means that it will boost retail activities in the area, and not turning it into another Southbank (good point about investing in retail property in the area).
So to the OP, certainly compared to the 36m2 studio, there are better buys even within UWS itself, if you could afford something that's more than $300k.
Now anyone please come in anytime to criticise my suggestion, but strictly for new dwellings and looking at capital growth prospects, I think a boutique apartment (less than 50 units or so) in a suburb within 10kms of the CBD would be a better choice, such as Carnegie or Hawthorn. They are both well-established suburbs with a close proximity to universities and shopping centre. Maybe even a townhouse near Highpoint Shopping Centre (have a look at Melbourne 2030 plan). Personally I think South Yarra and Prahran are expensive.
Sorry for the long post! I'm here to learn
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