PHOTO: With a budget of $650,000, Cody wasn’t prepared to spend a dollar more than she considered a property to be worth. Photo: Tara Moore
For four long years Billie Cody commuted from the house she owned in Bendigo to Ballarat for her civic construction project management job, and from Bendigo to Melbourne to see her partner Mick Lacata. And during those years she paid careful attention as prices in the towns north-west of Melbourne’s CBD began to climb.
“I’d been watching property prices continue to rise over a number of years,” she says. “The growth in Melbourne was pushing towards the west, starting with a surge in Rockbank and Melton and pushing out to Bacchus Marsh.”
Cody also ays talk of duplicating more of the train line between Melbourne and Ballarat over the next 10 years is likely to place additional pressure on property prices.
“That will be a gamechanger for the region and I think you’ll see some pretty big surges when that gets closer,” she says. So last year Cody and Lacata decided it was time to buy in Ballarat.
‘We wanted to buy a house we could live in for two to three years and eventually rent out with good, long-term capital growth prospects,” Cody says. “I was pretty familiar with the market after being here for four years so I looked at the growth in the best couple of suburbs over the last five years and also the last 12 months.”
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