Cost of Living in a $600,000 Townhouse in Melbourne Australia / First Home Buyer Edition

Welcome back everyone Andrew Moore here and today we are breaking down the cost of living in a $600,00 home here in Bayswater and joining me today is Dion Marsden a local real estate agent whos going to give us a tour.

So this property is priced from $590,000 to $649,000. Now if you bought the property for below $600,000 you would pay no stamp duty as a first home buyer here in Victoria, so what would cost someone else $31,000 to buy you get to avoid and even If you bought it for the top of the range at $649,000, you would pay only pay $11,000 for stamp duty as a first home buyer.

The way stamp duty works in Victoria is you pay no stamp duty up to $600,000 and then from $600,001 up to $750,000 its a sliding scale of how much you would pay. Once you buy over $750,000 you pay the full stamp duty like you would if you weren't a first home buyer.


The first cost that you are going to have when buying a property like this is council rates. The council calculates the total value of the rates which you will pay, based on their assessed value of your property. Simply put the more expensive your property the more you will pay in rates.

For this property the rates are $1,326 per year

The second cost is Water rates which for this particular property is $223 per quarter.

Now in order to buy this property at the top of the range borrowing 95% you would need a deposit of $76,708 roughly. This could change slight from bank to bank depending on their costs.

Ok lets talk mortgages. If we assume whoever buys this property is borrowing 95% because lets face it its hard to save your first house deposit, that would mean if you bought the property for $600,000 you would need a loan of $570,000. At the moment you could get an interest rate of 2.49% which is an insanely cheap rate. Also factoring in principle and interest repayments the monthly repayment amount would be $2,249

Keep in mind though if you are borrowing less than 95% your repayments would be less.

Now in order to buy and get a loan for 95% you would roughly need a deposit of $61,000

If however you bought for $649,000 which is the top of the range you would need a deposit of $77,000.