By Martin North, cross-posted from the Digital Finance Analytics Blog
We continue our series on how households decide what property to buy where. Having looked at factors including schools, shops and Internet, today we look at transport, including access to train stations, motorways, airports, and CBD. Using our segmented analysis we see very different behaviours in play.
First, we look at access to trains, where Young, Multicultural, Battlers and Disadvantaged segments are most likely to select a property close to a train station. Growing, Suburban and Stable are only slightly influenced by access to trains. They are much more likely to use motor transport.
Comparing this with access to motorways, we quite a different footprint, with Exclusive, Stable and Suburban segments the most influenced, although both Young and Disadvantaged segments also consider this aspect.
If we overlay travel time to CBD, we see that Suburban, Stable and especially Exclusive rate this dimension highly. Battlers and Disadvantaged will factor this element in, but other considerations are more important to them (e.g. affordability).
Access to airports, is a factor which Growing, Suburban, Stable and especially Exclusive segments value. Other groups will tend to trade this away.
So we see that segments have different transport preferences and needs. We also see that some groups trade away convenience and short travel times to purchase larger or cheaper properties further away and in less convenient locations. We discussed this in the context of first time buyer life-style trade-offs recently.
Next time we will look at some of the property specific features which influence buying decisions by segment.
