How to Pick the Best Suburb for You: 5 Things to Consider


When choosing a suburb to live in Australia, there are 5 things to consider.

Picking the correct suburb, you will need to identify in order, the location closest to your significant relationships, interests, and charity, ensure your demographic area is compatible, look at local infrastructure in the form of shopping, health facilities, and transport, look to recreational facilities and schools, and finally identify future development and planning for consideration.

Location to Family, Interests, and Charity

How to find your Happiest place to live is the first paramount idea when choosing the correct suburb to live in. You can read more about this HERE.

How to find your happiest place to live is centered around the proximity to your close relationships, and interests, which can include occupation and your preferred charitable activity.

The article mentioned goes into detail on why these three criteria are important and a few tips on how to find these areas.

Once your region has been established, the criteria below will assist in narrowing down your winning suburb. These criteria should be weighted on what you consider to be most to least important. Often there will be a lot of overlap helping you narrow down your decision.

Demographic Considerations

Demographics speak to the age, nationality, religion, income status and housing structure (renter vs owner occupier) of the suburb.

If you are a retiree, then choosing an older demographic suburb may be more suitable as this will translate to the types of neighborhood groups and activities you can be involved in, along with people in a similar life stage. This concept can also be considered if you are a young family, single, ect.

Religious considerations are also important. Your spiritual journey may be grown with your close proximity to a local Church, Temple, or Mosque and how this religious institution translates into local businesses and charities for you to be involved in.

Australia has clear nationality-distinct suburbs. The census data also shows languages spoken in the home, other than English, overlap with the nationality profiles. Being part of a suburb where your nationality and language are common will help you feel more familiar.

A good resource HERE will show you the suburb profile maps based on the census data for religion, ethnicity, and language. This resource HERE will also show you a map based on income data to understand the average declared income.

Infrastructure Shopping, Health Facilities, and Transport

Infrastructure in the form of shopping, health facilities, and transport are also important considerations.

Within Australia, your proximity to a major supermarket is a good indicator of the density of your suburb and the type of housing. Around major supermarket chains, or plazas will be smaller apartments or townhouses, with larger low-density housing the further you are away from these centres.

Large health facilities near your chosen suburb should also be a consideration. How long do you want to travel for an emergency or specialist appointment?

Transport links, main highways, large roads, and rail, tram, or separate bus lines are also important items to consider. If you do need to drive to work in the morning, having the capacity to use good local public transport could be the difference in you spending your mornings and evenings stuck in traffic.

A good rule of thumb would be to consider your location to be more than a 1.5-hour drive from a major hospital, 20 minutes from a major supermarket, and a 5-minute drive to a railway station or independent tram line, bus way (off-road).

A good website that helps your density and walkability factor can be seen HERE along with Hospital locations HERE and Shopping Mall locations HERE.

Railway and the main road arteries will need to be independently searched based on your city or State.

Recreational Facilities and Schooling

Schooling and fun activities for you and your family are important when choosing a suburb.

If you have children and wish for your child to attend a specific public school, living in a school catchment zone is crucial. High-demand schools will give preference to people who live in that suburb before allowing for any outer suburb transfers.

You also would want to consider what school has the best performance with education. This site HERE will show you all school’s performance and University rankings.

Here is a list of websites you can use to identify school catchment zones.

Queensland school catchment zone

New South Wales school catchment zone

Victoria School catchment zone

ACT school catchment zone

South Australia school catchment zone

Western Australia school catchment zone

Northern Territory school catchment zone

Tasmania school catchment zone

A good tool to identify recreational facilities is google maps and or local facebook pages.

If your recreational interest is considered of high importance based on the previous article HERE, then you should already be selecting suburbs that are close to this location.

Future Development and Planning

Understanding the future plans of your proposed area can help you see if you would be willing to stay for the long term. Will the new developments change the demographic profile of your suburb to a point where you would still wish to stay?

A recent example is the property boom in and around future train line stations. When these announcements get made, it seems housing prices within the area increase in value, and the density profiles of the housing structures can also change.

If you wish to be close to a trainline, looking at an area where there may be a future proposed station could still be in your consideration.

A good tool is to look to your local state or council website to see within the areas what future development opportunities may exist.

A Brisbane example can be seen HERE that shows sites in different stages of development from proposal to current active construction.

Most councils will have future development plans that are often in conjunction with state planning.

Rank Ordering and Putting it All Together

Figuring out what your priority is with respect to demographics, recreation and schooling, infrastructure and future development and planning is really up to you.

Ranking them in order from most to least important, while putting together a distance or time radius on a map, can help you narrow things down.

When choosing a suburb, as long as it is close to your original three requirements, close relationships, interest and or career, and charity, you are generally well covered. Your limitations may be within your school catchment zone of facility distance.

If you are struggling to find a place to live in these locations there are always services and professionals you can reach out to for advice.

In Australia, a Renters Agent or Buyers Agent may be helpful in giving you some on-the-ground context based on their experience and or securing you a great property in your desired area.

To learn more on how they can help, please select your preference Renters Agent or Buyers Agent.

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