Bucasia vs Mowbray vs Wandina: One Scores 99/100

Wandina Property Market: you asked us to run the numbers on this Geraldton suburb, and the model gives it 99 out of 100 with vacancy at 0.9%. It’s the highest-conviction pick in this showdown, but it’s also the slowest-selling market of the three. → Latest median house price: $775,000 → 12-month movement: +19% → Gross rental yield: 4.66% → Vacancy rate: 0.9% → R-Score: 99/100 → National rank: 4th out of 15,286 suburbs → 18 house sales in the last 12 months → Days on market: 139 days The verdict: Wandina is a genuine growth bet, not a set-and-forget safe hold. The data is extremely strong on supply, vacancy, income and population, but the low yield, high price point and slow days on market mean you need to be selective on street and very disciplined on entry. Download our no-cost Top Five Markets Report 2026 → https://ripe.house/showdown-ep2 Want your suburb checked next? Drop it in the comments. Subscribe for daily Suburb Check videos. #Wandina #WAProperty #AustralianProperty #PropertyInvesting #SuburbCheck #Geraldton This video is general information only and not financial or investment advice. Consider your own circumstances and seek professional advice.

Three suburbs, three states, and one viewer who picked all of them, Bukazio in tropical Queensland, Mowbray in northern Tasmania, Wandina in Western Australia's Midwest. On a real estate portal, these look like three versions of the same bet, $560,000, $735,000, $775,000. Same money roughly, three completely different outcomes. One of these scores 99 out of 100 and ranks number four in the entire country out of 15,286 suburbs. One sits in the most disadvantaged socio-economic decile in Australia, and it's the only one of the three where the market is actually genuinely trading. And here's the number that made me stop. The two suburbs our model likes most are the two suburbs where almost nothing sold all year, worst to first. Let's go. Quick setup because this framework is what makes this show work. Every suburb goes through the same unsentimental process, five demand drivers on one side, employment, projects, lifestyle, population, income, subtract the one thing that kills returns, supply. What's left is opportunity. That's the whole equation and it doesn't care how nice the beach is. Then four layers of research, macro, LGA, suburb, street, top down, always in it because the best street in a failing LGA is still a bad buy and a great LGA can't save you from buying the wrong side of a highway. Today's three came from one viewer, Dwella Sordo, who dropped all three in the comments on the 16,000 searches video back on the 7th of July. That makes them the oldest open requests on our list. And honestly, it's a genuinely well chosen three. Let's find out if he's got an eye for it. If you want the suburb level data before it's obvious to everyone else, subscribe. Three suburbs get rated every day and this is the first place the numbers land. Number three today, Mowbray, Tasmania, postcode 7248, five kilometres northeast of Launceston on the East Tamar Corridor wrapped around a golf course with the University of Tasmania's campus sitting right on its edge. Median house, $560,000 are the cheapest entry in today's episode. 34 house sales in the last 12 months, which is more than the other two suburbs combined. It's also the lowest scoring suburb today. Both of those facts are true at the same time. And the reason why is the most useful lesson in this episode. Start top down. The LGA is city of Launceston, four metrics against every other LGA in Australia. Employment, 72nd percentile. That's genuinely good. And it's the health and education economy doing the work. Launceston General Hospital, the university, the retail and agricultural services base, Northern Tasmania's economic centre, supply 35th percentile. Below average and in supply terms, below average is good news for an owner. Not much new stock is coming. Population, 57th percentile. Modest, but positive. The LGA grew 1.15% and Mowbray itself grew 1.17% over three years. Slowing from a previous trend of 2.28, but still growing. Major projects, 41st percentile, below average. Project spend per capita is better at the 60th percentile, but there is no transformational infrastructure story here. And now the number that matters most, because it's the one that flows straight down into the suburb, Launceston's unemployment rate sits at the 17th percentile nationally. Only 17% of Australian LGAs have it worse, 8.3% unemployment. So the LGA picture is a real economic centre with a genuine jobs base and a persistent unemployment problem underneath it. Hold that thought because when we get to Mowbr