There’s a lot of land in Australia, but did you know that, not like in the old days, house and land purchase and rental prices in the major cities like Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra are so high that they’re not much different to Tokyo? The Gold Coast is an area that’s been growing in popularity from year to year, and while Sydney and Melbourne property prices have stagnated recently, they say prices on the Gold Coast are set to continue rising. The reason is that property purchase and rental prices in Melbourne and Sydney are too high, so more and more people are buying a house on the Gold Coast and moving in. About 30 years ago, you could buy a house with a pool on the Gold Coast if you had 15 million yen, but it has reached the point now where if you were thinking of buying a house with a pool, you couldn’t buy a place that is a 10-minute walk to a Gold Coast beach for less than 50 million yen, although it varies depending on location. I live in Australia and earn an income in Australian dollars, so an $800,000 house for example (about 62 million yen because of the strong yen) would be worth 80 million yen to me, a price that is quite hard for your regular company employee or average income earner to afford. Rents too are going up. When I arrived on the Gold Coast 20 years ago, $200 a week would get you a two-bedroom apartment (“2LDK” in Japan) a 3-minute walk from central Surfers Paradise (incidentally, in Australia, the rental prices shown are weekly prices), which is about 15,600 yen or about 62,400 yen per month, but now that has more than doubled to $400 or $450 per week. Rent of $450 a week is about 140,000 yen in monthly rent. Rents continue to go up even if the building is old and hasn’t been renovated. Of course there are areas on the Gold Coast where the rents are high and areas where they’re low, and then there’s the main road, the Gold Coast Highway, which runs parallel to the Gold Coast coastline, with prices differing depending on whether the property is on the sea side or the inland side of the highway. You can rent a 2-bedroom apartment in a less popular area for between $320 and $350 a week. The popular areas are alongside the beaches and close to shops, areas like Broadbeach, Mermaid Beach, Miami Beach (where I live), as well as Burleigh Heads, and Palm Beach. A while back, Palm Beach was still undeveloped and you would have to say it wasn’t a very popular place, but now new apartment blocks are going up one after the other, there are more and more fashionable restaurants and cafes, and rental prices are steadily going up too. You would mostly pay $450 to $500 a week for a 2-bedroom apartment in these popular areas, even in an old four-story brick apartment building built a long time ago. The further you go inland, away from the beach, the cheaper rents get, so if you want to live in a nice, relatively new property, it's a good idea to look inland. While wages are also high in Australia, I think the proportion of rent to income has increased a little compared to past years. Also, apart from unfurnished rental properties in Australia, there are furnished ones. Some of the furnished properties have all the furniture you need for everyday life, like sofa, TV, and beds, while others only have the white goods, like fridge and washing machine. There are condominiums in tourist destinations like Surfers Paradise that are unfurnished and others that are furnished. Rents vary depending on the location in any country, they might vary depending on whether the property is close to the station or not, but on the Gold Coast, prices vary depending on whether the property is close to the beach or not. Hedges Avenue is a narrow road in my neighborhood that fronts the beach in Mermaid Beach and is famous for having lots of magnificent houses. The houses occasionally come up for sale and are sold at prices like 300 or 400 million yen. In this neighborhood rents are high even for apartments that have been renovated nicely inside, even if the building is decades old. Many landlords and real estate agencies are not raising rents because of COVID-19, but I think that on the Gold Coast, rents will continue to go up for a while yet.