Karratha property boom
I was criticized by some for cherry-picking my houses in the last Australian property post. I did not cherry pick houses – but chose ordinary houses in fashionable suburbs. I stated that clearly in the post. The criticism – if any – was that the suburbs were cherry-picked.
Now I am going cherry-picking. Karratha is a remote town in Western Australia – near the main port for loading iron-ore for its trip to China. It is also near the new ($12 billion) Pluto LNG development.
Land release is limited because the land is owned by the Ngarluma Aboriginal Corporation and this town – more than any other – is the epicenter of the Australian resource boom. I am just going to pick one house from www.realestate.com.au – but there are many others. This is a new house on the edge of suburbia - and you can have it for just over a million dollars.
You get a bathroom too –
This is in – as the Google map shows – a new development in the desert…
And just so you know there is no scarcity value to the real-estate I zoomed out a little:
There is increasing land release by the local aboriginal community.
But there is a bull case. You can probably rent this out for $1500 per week. And the iron-ore boom does not looking like stopping rapidly. However the construction phase of the Pluto project will stop by 2012 and local employment should fall a little then.
John