Experts tip Adelaide to boom

Adelaide was closely followed by Canberra, Melbourne and Perth, while Darwin was found to be the worst city in terms of livability.

Sydney, while only ranking marginally higher than Darwin, saw the largest increase since last year’s report.

Speaking to Smart Property Investment's sister publication The Adviser, Destiny Financial Solutions’ Margaret Lomas said that Adelaide should be considered as the next big investment spot.

“Perth did incredibly well a few years ago and continues to produce strong results and I think Adelaide is going much the same way,” she said.

“Adelaide is definitely going to have a lot of interest. It has the beauty of having some mining interest, without being mining dependent – it really is a very diversified place."

The 5,231 respondents of the My City survey, from all capital cities including Newcastle and Wollongong, ranked the importance of 17 attributes against their city.

While in all cities outdoor environments and facilities were ranked highly – along with school and education and climate – public transport, roads and traffic congestion, environmental sustainability were ranked poorly across the board.

The provision of affordable housing performed the worst of all, with an average of 34 per cent approval across the cities, suggesting that supply is still a national issue.

“On average around three out of five (62 per cent) respondents agree that their city has a good balance of different housing types," the report states.

“Adelaide and Melbourne performed best on this attribute while Sydney and Darwin performed worst in this regard. Sydney was the only city that showed a slight improvement since 2010 in this attribute."

This report serves as a good indicator for how people are viewing property and quality of life in their cities, said Property Council national policy director Ken Morrison.

“We need a nation-wide effort to boost the performance of our cities to meet the challenges of the future: population, housing, infrastructure and climate change,” Mr Morrison said.

“These results should shock governments into action to lift the performance of our cities.”

However, Ms Lomas said that Adelaide will see continuing  success for investors  due to an import and export industry seeing success from the accessibility of the Port and other infrastructure.

“Ultimately," she said, "Adelaide will continue to be a hotspot of activity.”

Any investor that is prepared to “hold their property” for a while will reap the benefits of investing in this up and coming state, Ms Lomas explained.

“Yields will keep growing, values will keep growing and it will make  solid addition to any portfolio,” she said.

The My City survey was undertaken by Auspoll for the Property Council of Australia.