by Deborah Teazis

Created on: May 06, 2009

Many people travel to Australia and fall in love with the country. Each year several thousand people from around the world decide to make Australia home. Sydney New South Wales and Melbourne Victoria are two of the most popular choices for new Australian's to settle, both are huge city's with fantastic infrastructure, great quality of life, relaxed and friendly people and affordable to live.

But what if you had no idea about where the most affordable property was? not everyone can afford to move into the affluent suburbs with 3 million dollar homes. When you are new to a country or area, you do not have the local knowledge that long term residents have.

This article will focus on Melbourne, with it's Victorian buildings sharing space with more modern architecture and sprawling new development estates. The more upmarket areas of Melbourne include, South Yarra, Toorak, Hawthorne, Brighton, St kilda and Kew. These areas fetch any where from $1.2 million dollars up to $6 million dollars each and more. They are well established areas close to the city and have an abundance of quality services such as top class medical facilities, excellent schools, an array of first class shopping and a great sense of both affluence and history.

Other areas close by include Richmond, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Carlton, all of these areas are entrenched into the history of Melbourne and have some of the best parks and gardens for the use of both visitors and residents alike. They have the look and feel of what many would expect from a British colony, with grand homes built and desighned like something you would find in a London street-scape.

As you move out of the Melbourne Metropolitan area you come to what where once known as the working class areas of Clifton Hill, Thornbury and Fairfield, with the smaller cottages built for the factory workers and two story Victorian town houses for the mildly affluent of the 1900s. Of course, many of the original homes have been pulled down for new development or renovated to a more modern look, and so you often have a 1900s cottage sitting next to a modern 2006 architect designed home. You can still pick up a property in one of these areas for about $800,000 to $1.3 million but the blocks they are built on are usually quite small with little in the way of garden space, more like courtyard space.

As Melbourne grew other areas of Melbourne started to take off, with developers buying large tracks of land fifteen to thirty kms from the city and new suburbs

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