Australia has some outstanding markets which are performing on every metric, including price growth, rental growth, low vacancies and high yields.

And many of these places on not what you might expect.

Every quarter, Hotspotting publishes a report we call The Pulse, to identify 50 locations across Australia which deliver rental yields well above the average to investors.

The primary parameter of our national Top 50 list is to identify good markets with high rental yields, but our criteria also includes prospects for capital gains – and this report features locations which perform outstandingly well on price growth.

To provide an example of the possibilities, consider the regional town of Murray Bridge in South Australia.

In Murray Bridge, house rents have risen 27% in the past year, with the vacancy rate dropping further in the latest quarter to just 0.4% and the median rental yield growing from 5.4% to 5.5%. The median house price has grown 22% to $415,000 in the past year.

In Geraldton in WA, the median house price rose 11.6% to $355,000 in the past quarter, but the median rental yield remained well above average at 6.7%, following a 23% annual rise in house rents, with vacancies low at 0.8%.

This report also highlights some of the nation’s promising unit markets, in recognition of the rising trend of more and more buyers opting for apartments and townhouses – and attached dwellings now out-performing on price growth.

In Bowen Hills in inner-city Brisbane, the vacancy rate is 1.2% and the median unit rent has risen 15% in the past 12 months, with the median rental yield increasing from 6.2% to 6.6% in the past three months. 

In that quarter, the median unit price has increased 7.1% from $425,000 to $455,000.

There are many other examples of this kind of outstanding performance on both rents and capital gains – all identified in the new quarterly edition of The Pulse.