WATCH: May 9, 2022 Whitsunday Weekly E-News

Hi, Annette Neil from PRD Whitsunday

This week, I’m coming from a suburb in the Whitsundays called Strathdickie, which is a suburb with beautiful rolling hills, and this is where acreages are alive and well in the Whitsundays. It’s quite a tightly held suburb. These properties rarely come up for sale in recent times and of course if they do it is the lifestyle type property that we are seeing lots of demand for. I  just thought I'd touch on that with all of the stories in the media about the market bottoming out.
So, we're still seeing massive demand for properties, lifestyle properties such as what we have here in Strathdickie . Also, interestingly, this week, we saw quite a fight over a unit at a lower price point in  Cannonvale. We're finding investors are still very active, and of course, that's because the rental returns at the moment are incredibly high with such a low vacancy rate here in the Whitsundays. So, although the interest rates are creeping up slightly, returns on rental properties are still stronger than the interest rate price. It's still a really option for a lot of people out there.

Some other interesting data this week from tourism Whitsundays who put out the snapshot of statistics for April on visitors to our region
We did see visitors staying slightly longer, up 0.3 of a day from what they were previously. We've also seen the average spend per night or nightly rate has increased slightly as well. Occupancy rates also up, a lot stronger than they were 12 months ago and stronger than the month before in March.

We've seen no change with the average or the, I should say, the largest demographic of people coming from Mackay and still looking at those long weekends that's still when the town is buzzing, but it's great to see no sign of tourism slowing down.