I wrote this morning how several Queensland towns are experiencing falling house prices and rents as the three large LNG projects being built in Gladstone begin to wind-up construction.
Well, you can add Queensland’s coal mining communities into the mix, with The AFR this afternoon reporting plummeting house prices and rents in regions surrounding the Bowen Basin:
Property prices in mining heartland of the Bowen Basin – which rode the wave of the coal boom – have fallen off a cliff, burning investors who believed China’s thirst for Australian resources would never end.
The median value of a home in Morbanah, about 200 kilometres west of Mackay, have fallen 66 per cent in the past three years, from $404,006 to $251,933, according to new figures from CoreLogic RP Data.
Further south in Dysart, close to BHP’s Norwich Park coal mine which closed in 2012 and the neighbouring Saraji mine which is still operating, there has been a 46 per cent fall in house prices over the same period, from $414,788 to $325,962.
Properties that used to receive rents of $3,000 to $4,000 a week during the boom, are now only getting $220 a week, leaving investors struggling to pay their mortgages. Many have gone under…
Since the coal price plummeted, thousands of mining workers have been let go as resource companies close mines or shelve expansions…
The below data from SQM Research illustrates the extend of the decline.
In Morbanah (postcode 4744), both asking prices and and rents have more than halved over the past three years:
The situation appears similar in Dysart, although the data is incomplete (see here and here).
