Expert reveals the best-performing capital city market on the mainland

“If you were looking to buy into a market, I reckon you’ve got two options: there’s either Adelaide or Brisbane because basically everywhere else is going backwards,” the PIPA chairman said.

With the previous success of Sydney and Melbourne over the last 10 years, Mr Koulizos said that the next 10 years are unlikely to do well, while Adelaide and Brisbane are next in line to see growth.

“I’m not saying they’re going to have double-digit growth for the next three or four years, but if you were looking to park your money somewhere for the next five or 10 years, it wouldn’t be Sydney or Melbourne because they’ve already had their growth. It wouldn’t be Hobart; it's already had its growth. [Therefore, it’s] Brisbane and Adelaide.

“Since 2007, [Brisbane and Adelaide] haven’t really experienced that upward swing, so sooner or later, Adelaide and Brisbane are going to take off. Now, the early signs are that it’s Adelaide.”

The major reason for Adelaide’s high level of performance, Mr Koulizos said, was due to the affordability of the state’s market.

“Maybe 12 months ago, you could afford to borrow $700[,000], but everything else being the same, your wages being the same, your partner’s wages being the same, expenses haven’t increased, now you might be able to only borrow $500,000,” the chairman said.

“Well, if you were looking to buy, say, in Sydney and Melbourne, $700,000 gave you a fair few options. $500,000 doesn’t give you many. But you go to Adelaide, $500,000, you’ve got a lot of very good options, you can buy close to the city, character properties on a reasonable size block of land. So, you have some very good capital growth options.”

Regardless, Mr Koulizos said that investors need to focus their efforts past the capital city and refine their search to locate a suburb, then down to a street, then to a property, “because location is almost everything in property”.

The chairman said: “You can change everything else. You can change the house, you can make it bigger, you can make it smaller, you can knock it down. You can make it better by renovating it. You can make the block smaller by subdividing. You can make the block bigger, which is expensive, by buying the next-door neighbour’s. But you can never change where it is, so you want to make sure you’ve got your macro location, your capital city and your suburb right, and your micro location, your street and your position within the street.”