Elsie Lange
A picture’s worth a thousand words, and it took 25.5 million Australians counted in the census to paint a portrait of the country.
The new census data shows a population increase in the Macedon Ranges, from 46,100 in 2016 to 51,458 in 2021 – an 11 per cent rise.
Alongside the population increase are interesting details about the way houses are occupied and tree changes.
The ranges experienced a drop in unoccupied private dwellings – from 1858 in 2016, down to 1648 in 2021. That represents a 2.2 per cent decrease in the number of vacant properties.
Macedon’s TCC Real Estate agent Kirrily Evans said these figures could be put down to people moving out of the city into new properties or their holiday homes because of the impact of pandemic lockdowns.
“Especially through 2020, when we were going through the Covid lockdowns, what we found is there were a lot of buyers who were living in Melbourne who were wanting to move out here for that regional address,” Ms Evans said.
“They were wanting that regional postcode so they weren’t in lockdown, but then also too, through that period they reassessed lifestyle.
“A lot more people were working from home, so they weren’t necessarily having to travel into an office and into the city on a daily basis, so then the mindset changed.”
She said she noticed when people with holiday homes realised they were able to work from home in a beautiful regional area, they rapidly made the leap.
“I actually had a property that I sold in Gisborne, and they were purely buying it for a holiday house, but through that Covid second lockdown, they ended up moving here,” she said.
Ms Evans said there was also a high demand for rentals, because the region did not have “an excess of properties that are just sitting vacant”.
“We’ve got a really high turnover for rentals, they don’t sit on the market for long before they are snapped up,” she said.
