What is Infill Risk?
Avoiding Oversupply
If you’re hunting for a house, to avoid oversupply, all you have to do is avoid large tracts of vacant land like in the image below to the west of Melbourne…
Even if there’s no development proposed right now, there could be next year.
Right now, house and land packages are in high enough demand for this not to be a big deal for most locations. The level of interest from buyers might be sufficient to exceed the ability of local government and developers to supply the infrastructure and new lots. But why take the risk?
A Safer Bet
A safer bet would be a fully built-out area as shown following…
This is a suburb to the north west of Adelaide’s CBD. You can see there’s no more vacant land within the suburb, or in its immediate neighbours either. So long as you buy a house in this suburb, it’s a much safer investment over the long-term than a unit or a house near vacant land.
Infill Example
Here’s an aerial view of a spot between Brisbane and the Gold Coast that has been the target of heavy infill for quite a few years now…
The brown scars are where vegetation has been cleared for new houses…
Some streets have been planned, but vegetation not cleared yet, you can see the streets pencilled in…
The following map is of Sydney. It shows suburbs with low risk of infill in yellow. These are fully built-out. The areas in green are suburbs deemed to have “some” risk of infill
Summary
