The suburb that just took the crown as Melbourne’s most popular

Tarneit has been named the Melbourne suburb where home buyers splashed the most cash in 2025, edging out Brighton, which topped the list for the past five years.

Despite its modest median house value of about $709,000, the western suburb recorded 1666 sales in the year to September 2025.

It dwarfed the 272 sales recorded in pricier Brighton, where the typical house costs just over $3.2 million. It also edged out fellow western suburb Point Cook.

While the result might seem surprising, the sheer number of sales in Melbourne’s west is what saw Tarneit rise to the top, Cotality’s executive research director Tim Lawless said.

“Tarneit and Point Cook are not what you’d call prestige, but they have a lot of volume. They tend to be large suburbs – there are about 24,000 properties across Tarneit,” he said.

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“When you look at somewhere like Brighton, there are about 11,000. So the size of the suburbs makes a big difference. And Tarneit has a turnover of 7.5 per cent, which is huge.”

Home buyers pumped more than $1.1 billion into Tarneit in 2025. In comparison, Brighton’s property turnover was 4.6 per cent last year but its higher median house price took it to $1.053 billion in total sales value.

Fellow prestige suburbs Glen Waverley (with a median price of $1.87 million) and Kew ($2.86 million) rounded out the list at number four and five respectively.

Lawless said that buyers in those suburbs might be more likely to be looking for a “forever home”, whereas people buying in Tarneit, or Point Cook (about $885,000), could see it as a stepping stone to build equity and move up the market.

Jeff Gaul, senior sales director at Ray White Werribee, agrees. He’s found owner-occupiers he deals with in Tarneit and surrounding areas tend to stay in a home for around seven years before using their equity to upsize or move out of the area. And the local market isn’t slowing.

“We’re currently seeing a buyer demand stronger than that coming out of the lockdown period,” he said. “[That time] was insane in itself – no one had seen those kinds of numbers – and it’s currently actually stronger than that.”

Sumita Mukherjee, 62, has recently been on both sides of the market. The Metro station officer and her husband are currently selling a home at 5 Nassau Road in Point Cook, after recently downsizing to a smaller property.

“I’m still in Point Cook, and I’ll stick to Point Cook,” she said. She noted a sense of community across a diverse variety of neighbours as a key reason why she moved to the suburb in 2016.

“We were looking to build a house. I used to live in Sunshine and I wanted to build there, but my husband said ‘no way’,” she said.

Sumita Mukherjee has lived in Point Cook since 2016, and is a big advocate for the area.Credit: Alex Coppel

“So I looked into [Point Cook], and read the reviews. It was up and coming, but we went and got a feel of the place, and I liked it immediately. It’s a good mix of people: everyone from software developers to tradespeople.”

And while she acknowledged that the suburb has been in the news for issues with youth crime, she feels safe even arriving home late at night.

“I work in shifts: I start at three in the morning, come back at three in the morning. It’s actually very safe. And the police are very vigilant nowadays.”

Mukherjee’s real estate agent, Fletchers Wyndham director Harpreet Walia, believes freeway and public transport connections to the city, as well as good local schools, were major factors drawing people to the suburb.

Walia said the area has changed significantly since he moved there in 2011.

“It was farmland when I moved here, and houses have popped up everywhere because of the demand. And I’m sure those last [rural] lots will be snapped up at some stage.”

Across the bay, Matt Cleverdon, buyer’s advocate at Morell and Koren, said the motivations for people to move into Brighton include: “lifestyle, school, proximity to the city and water, a good sense of space. It’s a great combination.”

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But he wasn’t surprised Brighton had moved down the list – he believes sellers at the top end of the market are not as motivated to sell as they have been in the past.

“They can’t move to something better or the next stage of life,” he said. “There’s a lot of people in these areas with a strong want to move, but not necessarily a strong need to move.”

In contrast, Mukherjee said she doesn’t believe her recent move within Point Cook will be her last.

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