Mortgage Brokers Across Newcastle

Buying in Newcastle

Newcastle is not one property market. A worker’s cottage in Islington, a unit in Newcastle West and a family home in New Lambton Heights sit at very different price points and suit very different lending. Knowing which one you are buying into changes what you should borrow and which lender is likely to say yes.

The spread is wider than the city’s reputation suggests. Tarro publishes the lowest house median at $750,000 and Bar Beach the highest at $3,900,000 — a little over five times as much, and twenty minutes apart. Twenty-nine of the 44 suburbs here that publish a house median are now at or above $1,000,000, so for most buyers the question is not whether Newcastle is affordable but which Newcastle they are looking at.

Fourteen of the 46 publish no unit median at all — Stockton, Sandgate, Tarro, Merewether Heights and New Lambton Heights among them — because too few units change hands there for a median to mean anything. Newcastle West runs the other way and publishes only a unit figure. Where both exist the gap is usually wide: Bar Beach’s house median sits $2,540,000 above its unit median. Maryville is the one that catches people out, with units at $1,450,000 against houses at $1,240,000 — and unit rents above house rents to match.

Rents follow the same map. Tarro asks $605 a week for a house at the bottom of the range and Bar Beach $1,595 at the top. If you are weighing buying against renting, that difference is worth knowing before you decide which suburbs to look in, and it is on every page below.