I'm Joey Don. Ballarat opens a price point that a lot of investors are shut out of in metro Melbourne, and the same flat fee applies. What I am not going to do on this page is quote you a headline regional yield — our published record is 345 settlements with a median gross yield after works of 5.77%, and only 14 of those 345 reached 8%.
Joey Don · Last updated · 2026-08-31
Ballarat, Geelong or metro Melbourne is a real question, and the honest way to answer it is with numbers you can check rather than numbers we assert. The structural case for regional Victoria is a lower entry price, a commuter rail link into Melbourne, and a large committed infrastructure pipeline — the Ballarat Base Hospital redevelopment alone is a $655 million Victorian Government investment. This page has stopped quoting suburb medians, vacancy rates, days-on-market and commuter growth figures we could not source; where a number matters to your decision, we point you at where to get the current one. What we can publish is our own record: across the 212 granny-flat additions in our 345-settlement dataset (offer dates January 2023 to September 2025, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886) the median gross yield after works was 5.79%. Regional briefs are the same flat $15,800 + GST as metro ones.
The core of the regional case is entry price: a Ballarat house costs materially less than a comparable metro Melbourne one, which changes both the deposit required and the rent-to-price arithmetic. We have removed the specific medians an earlier version of this page quoted for Ballarat and metro Melbourne — they carried no source and a median without a source and a date is not a fact, it is a decoration. Median prices are published monthly by the major data providers and by the REIV; use a current figure from one of them, or ask us for the settled comparables for the specific suburb you are looking at, which is the number that actually matters for an offer.
The commuter rail link is the structural reason regional Ballarat behaves differently from a regional town without one: it puts Melbourne employment inside a daily commute, which supports a rental market that is not purely local. We have removed a specific patronage growth percentage and specific suburb vacancy rates from this page, because neither was sourced. If patronage or vacancy matters to your decision, take the current figures from the operator and from a rental data provider rather than from a buyers agent’s website — including ours.
A share of our own settlements are in regional Victoria, and the dataset we publish is broken out by suburb so you can count them yourself rather than take a percentage from us: 345 settlements, offer dates January 2023 to September 2025, CC-BY 4.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886. Investor attention in Ballarat concentrates in the lower-priced suburbs, Sebastopol and Wendouree among them, for the obvious reason that the yield arithmetic works better at a lower entry price.
Ballarat Base Hospital is being redeveloped under a Victorian Government investment of $655 million, delivering a new multi-level tower and main entrance, a new emergency department with an integrated mental health and alcohol and other drugs hub, a helipad, a women’s and children’s hub and around 100 extra inpatient and short-stay beds. That is a large, committed, publicly documented employment anchor, which is a different quality of signal from a forecast. We have removed a claim that rents in hospital-adjacent precincts had risen by a specific percentage; we had no measurement behind it.
The Western Renewables Link and Western Highway works are the other two projects investors ask about. We are not going to put a combined budget figure or a development-application growth rate on them here, because the figures an earlier version of this page carried were unsourced. Check each project on its own proponent’s site for current scope and timing — and treat any infrastructure project as a reason to look, not as a reason to assume a price outcome.
Where infrastructure genuinely matters is timing and location relative to the works, not as a growth prediction. We have removed a year-on-year capital growth figure this page attributed to clients who bought in Ballarat’s north; a past growth rate quoted without its sample, its window and its source reads as a forecast whether or not it is meant as one, and we cannot substantiate it either way.
Larger typical lot sizes and a less constrained planning environment than inner metro Melbourne make a compliant second dwelling more often feasible in Ballarat than in, say, Brunswick. What that produces in practice is in the published record rather than in a headline: across all 212 granny-flat additions in the 345-settlement dataset the median gross yield after works was 5.79%, and only 14 of the 345 purchases reached 8% or above. Whether a particular Ballarat lot can take a second dwelling is decided by lot size, setbacks, easements and overlays, which is checked on the free planning property report before any feasibility.
Build costs and achievable rents both vary enough by site and by year that we quote them per property from current builder pricing and current comparable listings rather than publishing an average here — the figures an earlier version of this page gave were not sourced to either. What is worth knowing structurally is that a Heritage Overlay materially constrains what can be built and where, which is why the overlay check comes before the feasibility rather than after it.
An earlier version of this page said that seven of eighteen regional clients chose a granny flat strategy and that all of them achieved at least 7% gross yield in their first 12 months. That claim has been removed: it is not reproducible from our published dataset, and it sits at odds with what that dataset actually shows, where the median across 212 granny-flat additions is 5.79% and only 14 of 345 purchases reached 8% or above. Publishing an outcome claim that our own open data contradicts is worse than publishing nothing.
Suburb selection in Ballarat runs on the same inputs as anywhere else: entry price against achievable rent, lot size and what it permits, the approval pathway, and how much comparable supply is coming. We have removed the suburb median prices and the "yields consistently above 5.5%" claim an earlier version of this page carried for Wendouree and Sebastopol — neither figure was sourced, and a consistently-above claim about future yields is a representation we cannot substantiate.
The constraint that is checkable rather than assertable is planning. Where a Heritage Overlay applies, demolition and external change need a permit and a second dwelling may not be feasible at all — that shows up on the free planning property report for the specific address, and it is the first thing to check on any Ballarat lot you are considering for a granny flat. Days-on-market and vacancy comparisons between specific Ballarat suburbs have been removed from this page; they were unsourced, and they date faster than almost any other number in property.
We publish 345 completed transactions as open data (settled 2023–2025, CC-BY 4.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886), a share of them in regional VIC. We tailor suburb selection based on client risk tolerance, yield targets, and infrastructure timelines, ensuring each purchase aligns with the $15,800 + GST flat-fee service.
PremiumRea charges a flat $15,800 + GST fee, whether you buy in Ballarat, Geelong, or Melbourne metro. There are no hidden regional loadings or travel surcharges — clients know their costs upfront.
For first-home buyers the fee is $12,500 + GST, and an SMSF acquisition is $18,500 + GST. The auction-only service is $2,500 + GST. Note the timing consequence rather than a clearance-rate statistic we cannot source: there is no cooling-off period at a public auction, or within three clear business days either side of one, so at a Ballarat auction every check has to be complete before the hammer.
We believe transparent pricing is essential for investors comparing regional and metro opportunities. The comparison worth running is arithmetic rather than a claim: on a $600,000 purchase, a flat $15,800 + GST is $2,000 less than 2.5% of the price and $6,200 more than 1.5% of it — so a flat fee is better value at the top of a price band and worse at the bottom. Run that sum against your own budget and against whatever any other agency quotes you in writing. We are not going to publish an averaged claim about what clients saved.
The structural case is a lower entry price than metro Melbourne, a commuter rail link that puts Melbourne employment inside a daily commute, larger typical lot sizes that more often support a compliant second dwelling, and a large committed infrastructure pipeline including the $655 million Ballarat Base Hospital redevelopment. We have removed the specific medians, yield figures and commuter growth percentages this answer used to carry — none was sourced, and our own published record shows a median gross yield after works of 5.77% across 345 settlements with only 14 of those at or above 8%, so a headline "8% yields" framing does not survive contact with our own data.
Our fee is $15,800 + GST, identical for both metro and regional purchases. First-home buyers pay $12,500 + GST, SMSF clients $18,500 + GST, and auction-only assistance is $2,500 + GST. No location surcharges apply.
Investor attention concentrates in the lower-priced suburbs, Sebastopol and Wendouree among them, because the yield arithmetic works better at a lower entry price. We have removed the suburb median prices, the "yields up to 8%" framing and the specific oversupply and yield-cap claims this answer used to carry, because none of them was sourced. The check genuinely available to you is planning: generate the free planning property report for any address and read the zone and overlays, because a Heritage Overlay in particular changes what can be built and therefore what the strategy can be.
Ballarat Base Hospital is being redeveloped under a Victorian Government investment of $655 million, delivering a new multi-level tower and main entrance, a new emergency department with an integrated mental health and alcohol and other drugs hub, a helipad, a women’s and children’s hub and around 100 extra inpatient and short-stay beds — a documented, committed employment anchor. The Western Renewables Link and Western Highway works are the other two projects investors ask about. What we will not do is convert any of them into a rent or price outcome: an earlier version of this answer quoted rent rises near the hospital and a capital growth figure for Ballarat north, and we could not substantiate either. Treat infrastructure as a reason to look at an area, not as a prediction about it.
Yes — our published dataset of 345 transactions (settled 2023–2025) includes regional Victorian purchases in Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo alongside metro Melbourne. Every row is downloadable at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886.
No. The flat $15,800 + GST covers a regional engagement exactly as it covers a metro one — no travel surcharges, no regional loadings — and the auction-only tier stays at $2,500 + GST. The only thing that changes with a regional brief is the suburb research, not the price.
We run both against the same written brief rather than defaulting to either. The deciding factors are usually budget fit against each city's entry prices, the yield target and which strategy (granny flat, cosmetic renovation, hold) the local planning environment supports, commute anchors if anyone will live in or manage the property, and the timing of each city's infrastructure pipeline. Where the brief genuinely fits both, we present the comparison and let the numbers argue it out.
This page previously carried suburb medians, vacancy rates, days-on-market figures, commuter growth percentages and a client-outcome yield claim, none of which we could source and one of which our own open data contradicted. All have been removed and the removals are noted in place. What remains traces to the rows below, checked on 31 August 2026. The hospital figure is search-confirmed against the Victorian Health Building Authority rather than fetched, because the site did not respond to an automated request.
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