INSPIRE
Suburb
Somewhere between Toorak and Cairns, a small Queensland beach town became one of the country’s most exclusive postcodes. John Caruso meets someone who’s had a front row seat. There’s no tram to Noosa. No Harbour Bridge to cross, no eastern suburbs rail line, nothing resembling a commute just the Bruce Highway, a couple of roundabouts, and, if you’re arriving from Sydney or Melbourne, a short flight and maybe a hire car.
claim with an actual figure: Noosa is currently the only regional market in the country’s top thirty suburbs ranked by sales above five million dollars.
Welcome to 4567 - Noosa Heads which Tom Offermann says you could describe Noosa as an affluent northern suburb of those cities.
“It’s a place that people aspire to move to once they’ve made enough money to retire, or before then, to spend their holidays,” Tom says. Toorak and Mosman are addresses people are born into or spend decades earning their way toward. Noosa functions as the reward at the end of that same climb, regardless of which capital city it started in - which may be why the town has ended up feeling less like a rival to those markets and more of an extension of all of them.
It’s a strange claim for a town thousands of kilometres removed from Toorak or Mosman, until you delve a little deeper into how and why it’s grown the way it has. Tom has sold real estate here since 1986 and says that when he started, nine in ten residents were locals, mostly from Gympie and Brisbane. Over four decades that ratio has all but reversed. The buyers arriving now are the same people who might once have bought on Sydney’s north shore or in Melbourne’s inner east - they’ve simply worked out that the water’s warmer here, and that there are way more days of sunshine. A Westpac report Tom had open on his desk the morning we spoke backs the IN Noosa Magazine
Every other postcode on that list carries a capital city address; Noosa carries a surf club.
The town has adjusted its presentation to suit the buyers it now attracts, and Tom has watched that shift from close range. Back when he started, the uniform in Hastings Street was shorts, sneakers and Hawaiian shirts - comfortable and indistinguishable from the tourist trade around it. He and his staff deliberately moved away from that look, on the theory that a business handling this much money 160
owed its clients one level of formality. The same logic, he points out, that has a cattle auctioneer swap boots for clean shoes and khakis on sale day. Shirt and tie, not board shorts. It’s a small detail, but it’s the same instinct driving the marble office and the private negotiations - dress for the suburb you’re selling to, not the one you’re standing in. Tom’s proof of the shift isn’t a number at all - it’s a habit. Each year, when the nation’s top two hundred rich list runs in The Australian, he sees many names he recognises. “We know half of those people,” Tom says, and it isn’t boasting so much as bookkeeping - many have bought, sold, or holidayed through his office at some point, usually without anyone else in town clocking who they were. That anonymity is, by his own account, part of the appeal. Noosa’s wealthiest visitors and residents move down the main street in board shorts and thongs, indistinguishable from anyone else queuing for coffee, recognised by almost nobody except the agent who sold them the house. Property talk in Noosa travels fast -
PHOTOS: SUPPLIED
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