Buyer's Guide to this Murwillumbah Neighbourhood
Drew Wade is Murwillumbah born and bred and has been serving the area for 10 years.
Taking advantage of the NSW granny flat legislation
There’s a lot of homes in town that have taken advantage of the granny flat legislation in NSW, basically you can build a granny flat that is smaller than 65 square meters and have it attached to your house without the need for council approval.
Ageing population is driving demand for higher density
There's quite a furious demand for rental properties here, it’s getting to the point where we’ve had up to 90 people apply for rental properties.
This is largely because we have an ageing population and we have a real rental shortage at the moment.
Particularly through some of the older generations, the plus 50 single males, and similar for older women, sometimes they don't have a lot of family that are alive and around the area, there's not a lot of income, and so they're missing out to people who can pay more.
New developments
The granny flat additions in town have been great as it's improved the density of housing in the CBD, I do feel that there’s still a long way to go though.
We’ve got a section around Knox Park where all of the buildings there are approved for 3 stories.
We just sold our first property in there, and the owner is considering subdividing the block, so putting a 960 block there with an older home in the front, she’s looking at putting a couple of floors of units at the back to really capitalise to the high density of units.
There's also a development of townhouses and units, 20 odd units to go in behind the police station in the CBD, and they’re looking at being 2, 3 and 4 bedroom with walk up and elevator access, this will massively increase the density in the CBD and we’re expecting to see a quite lot of older residents in that as an alternative to a retirement village.