St Marys vs Lara vs Rockhampton City: One Scores 97/100

Three suburbs. Twenty points between first and last — and the biggest gap on the board sits between second and first, not last and second. Tonight's countdown: St Marys NSW opens the board with a capitulation that closed to an exact-zero sold-versus-asking gap in July — a first for this series. Lara VIC, a viewer request, printed an all-time-high sold price last month while its vacancy rate more than doubled in five months — both true at once. And Rockhampton City QLD closes it out: seven straight months at a perfect 100, one wobble down to 86, and straight back up to 97 — the mechanism fully visible in the data. Rated the same way every day: four layers of research — macro, council (LGA), suburb, then street — on real data, never a guess. 📊 CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 01:10 Property selection is a science + 4 layers of research 01:25 Leaderboard tease 01:36 Suburb #3: St Marys, NSW 06:02 Leaderboard update 06:12 Suburb #2: Lara, VIC 10:13 Leaderboard update 10:22 Suburb #1: Rockhampton City, QLD 14:35 Final leaderboard 14:42 Finale — podium, investor-type verdicts & CTA 🏆 TONIGHT'S RESULTS St Marys, NSW — R-Score 77 (3rd) Lara, VIC — R-Score 83 (2nd) Rockhampton City, QLD — R-Score 97 (Winner) 🎯 THE VERDICTS BY BUYER TYPE Growth buyer — Rockhampton City Yield buyer — Rockhampton City Owner-occupier — Lara 📥 Get the full research method behind these ratings, plus our current Boom Locations report: ripe.house/showdown-ep25 💬 Drop your suburb in the comments — three get rated every single day. ⚠️ General information only. Not personal financial or investment advice. Data current as at August 2026; always do your own research.

One of these three scored a perfect 100 for seven straight months. And it's the one where houses still sell for 437 grand, St. Mary's, New South Wales, Lara, Victoria, Rockhampton City, Queensland. One of them just watched its sellers cut $400,000 off their asking prices and its score went up 19 points in a single month. And one of them printed an all-time price high while its score moved the opposite way. Let's count them down. Property investment is a science, not a vibe, not a hot tip, a science. Every suburb we rate goes through the same four layers of research, the macro, the council, the suburb, and the street. Tonight's middle suburb is a viewer request, Lara, Victoria, for the E-Way trader who asked about the Geelong Corridor play. The other two come straight off the picky follow list and Rockhampton City has 202 members following it, one of the most watched suburbs on the platform. If you want your suburb rated, drop it in the comments. Three get rated every day and subscribe if you want tomorrow's board first. The data we rate these with is the same data sitting inside picky. Four layers, macro, the national picture, LGA, the council area where the jobs and the building approvals live, suburb, the actual market you're buying into, and street because two houses 800 metres apart can be completely different investments. Most people stop at layer three, the money is in layer four. Three face down cards, 77, 83, 97, 20 points between first and last, and the biggest gap on the board is between second and first. We start at the bottom in Sydney's west. In third place tonight, St. Mary's, New South Wales, postcode 2760, 68 picky members follow this suburb, and it's only the second Sydney suburb we've ever rated on this show. The hook, sellers here have cut $400,000 off their asking prices since Christmas, and the score jumped 19 points the moment they finished. Start at the top, the council layer, Penrith City Council, employment diversity, 88th percentile of every council in the country, healthcare anchors at 14% of jobs, retail 12, education 10, construction nine, a proper working cities mix, supply pipeline, 18th percentile, 21 approvals per thousand, dwellings renew up, this council is building hard, and it needs to be. Population growth, 72nd percentile, 6.8% over five years, there's 232,000 people and climbing, and the project's pipeline, 91st percentile, $5,325 per head of non-residential building value, $1.2 billion in 12 months. The biggest per capita pipeline on tonight's board, the council itself scores in the 88th percentile of all the councils we track. So, strong weather in Penrith. The suburbs problem is its own price tag. Layer three, the suburb itself, median sold price for houses, $1.1 million. That's up 11.7% on a year ago, but it's down 12% from the April peak, and that fall is the story. Gross rental yield, 2.88%. The worst on tonight's board, and it's a Sydney number, vacancy, 3.4%, drifting up from 2.7 in April. Days on market, 20. The slowest market tonight, 261 houses sold in the last 12 months. A deep, real market. Owner occupiers, 38%. Investors, 37. Public housing, 5.6. Population, 12,195 at the census. Median age, 34. Median household income, $1,190 a week. And the CIFAR card, decile one on all four indices. The most disadvantaged decile in the country. Remember that when we get to the winner. Here's what a capitulation looks like in data. Buy, side, chart one. The sold versus asking overlay. In December,