‘Don't tell them ... they'll all come': why are so many sea-changers moving to Geelong?

The Guardian

2 days ago

For the first time, Victoria's Greater Geelong has become Australia's most popular regional town, ending a two-year winning streak from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.
The latest Regional Movers Index report shows in the 12 months to the March quarter, the Greater Geelong local government area had a 9.3% share of total net internal migration, compared with the Sunshine Coast's 8.9%.
Just an hour from Melbourne, the coastal town was formerly famous mostly for being the home of the Cats (the city's beloved AFL team) and the last resting place of Australia's car manufacturing industry. Now, the city is changing and growing as a wave of people are taking a fresh look.
So what are they finding that is so attractive?
First, everyone mentions housing: it's just so much cheaper. Then, lifestyle – a 10-minute drive to work in the morning, a walk to the park – before it's back to affordability again. It really is just so much cheaper.
Tanisha Tod jokes the locals will hate her talking about it.
'Don't tell them [up in Melbourne],' she says. 'Then they'll all come.'
She is standing on the jetty, Corio Bay shimmering behind her. It's postcard-pretty, this spot where she has lunch. Tod moved her young family in January 2024 from Melbourne.
'Public schools in the west of Melbourne didn't seem too promising,' she says. 'The overcrowding of schools in the west, it's like 3,000, 4,000 kids.
'We looked around. We looked at the east, rent was like $900 a week, $1,000 a week. And then I was like, you know what? Let's just go to Geelong.
'We found an amazing four-bedroom place for $600 a week, and an amazing school zone, which my daughter is in now.'
Her husband was reluctant to come, but now he finishes every week in Torquay, just south of Geelong, where they go to the beach after work. Back in Melbourne, Tod was looking at taking an extra job, but now the family eat out. They go on holiday and put the kids in extracurricular activities without worrying about money.
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Malaysian-born, Tod says since moving to Geelong they have been welcomed with open arms – it's the first time she has felt 'part of the Australian community'.
Geelong has a growing arts scene and great restaurant culture, and, Tod pauses, even Dave Grohl, the lead singer of the Foo Fighters, picked the bay-side city over Melbourne.
'When Covid lifted, the Foo Fighters came to Geelong to perform,' she says. 'They didn't go to Melbourne. They chose Geelong.'
Geelong's influx comes amid an uptick of movement out of metropolitan areas to the regions, with capital city to regional relocations increasing by almost 11% on the last quarter, says Liz Ritchie, the CEO of the Regional Australia Institute.
'We can now see that 25% more people are moving from capital cities than the opposite direction, and actually net migration to regional Australia overall is 40% above pre-Covid average,' Ritchie says.
Greater Geelong's ascent on the leaderboard is set against a background of a rise in popularity in regional Victoria as a whole; the state captured 34% of the total net inflows into all of regional Australia during the March 2025 quarter, larger than the 28% share in the March 2024 quarter.
Leading the charge are millennials and gen Z, who are looking for more affordable housing and a lower cost of living outside the capitals.
The managing director at the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham, says 'the outflow from the capitals to the regional centres has become stronger than the inflow'.
He says prices along Queensland's Sunshine Coast have come closer into line with Brisbane recently.
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But the rise of remote working, and concerted effort from state governments to decentralise – such as Penrith in Sydney – have made employment opportunities stronger in the regions, he says.
'The challenge historically has been housing was cheaper but employment opportunities were much more limited. What a number of states have now been successful in doing is generating real industry in those regional centres.'
Beck Thistleton and her family didn't move to Geelong because of the price, but she certainly isn't complaining about it.
'My eldest, Tommi, she's autistic, she's very bright, and because it's not really a brand of autism that a lot of teachers have got a lot of training with, we were having a lot of problems with her,' she says.
Tommi was running away from school, and sometimes just refusing to go. Thistleton and her husband, who were renting in Kensington in Melbourne, moved to Armstrong Creek on the outskirts of Geelong because the local school was one of the first to pilot an inclusive program for autistic kids.
'I thought I was going to have to quit work to home-school but my daughter has gone to school ever since.'
The family now pay $300 a week less to live in a bigger house with an extra room and a massive back yard. Thistleton has joined the local gym, goes to yoga in the morning and says one of the things she loves is how active Geelong is.
'Because people aren't driving for 45 minutes into work every day,' she says. 'There's time for those activities, to be looking after yourself and go for a swim before work.'
Jess Templeton has been selling houses in Geelong for 12 years now. The estate agent says prices are rising as interstate investors look for a bargain, people from Melbourne move down and young families scale up.
'There's opportunity in Geelong,' she says.
'Most of our listings are selling in two to four weeks. So over the last 100 homes, our average days on the market is 27. But a lot of them are selling within a week. Last week we had one, five days.'
Templeton says for $500,000 there are parts of the city where you can still buy a stand-alone house on a 60-sq-metre block with three bedrooms and one bathroom.
'It would take us 12 minutes to get to the CBD,' she says.
For $1m you could easily get a four-bedroom home in a nice school zone area, she says.
'That's why people are coming here.'