23 Euphoria St, Craigieburn, is for sale at $690,000-$730,000 in one of the suburbs with the highest numbers of home sale settlements in Australia.

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Melbourne first-home buyers have driven Tarneit and Craigieburn to the top of the nation’s home sales ladder.

New figures from digital settlements platform PEXA have revealed the two postcodes were the only ones in the nation where more than 1000 residential property sales were finalised in the past three months.

They are among the 44,482 recorded across Victoria from the start of July to the end of September.

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But despite hosting the nation’s two busiest postcodes for sales, Victoria was the nation’s third busiest state overall behind Queensland and NSW.

The firm’s Property Insights data also show Victoria’s 76.1 per cent of property settlements with a mortgage was the second highest in the nation behind Western Australia, and a major indicator of first-home buyers picking up the slack from investors.

Chief economist Julie Toth said the data showed Victorian first-home buyers were increasingly taking over from investors, with postcodes that appealed to market entrants dominating sales.

“The pattern we are seeing in Victoria is that sales are highly concentrated … in other states the sales are dispersed across a greater area,” Ms Toth said.

“The Victorian property market is skewing very heavily to the greenfield (new housing estate) markets.

“A lot of these will be first-home buyer sales. People buying their own homes rather than buying an investment do have a higher percentage that take out a mortgage.”

The top suburbs for home sale settlements in Victoria.

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The economist noted that it was also a likely sign that a growing share of first-home buyers were now convinced there would be no further interest rate rises from the Reserve Bank.

Ms Toth added that Victoria’s heavy skew towards new housing estate area sales was possibly a motivation for the state government’s new policy to discount stamp duty costs for off-the-plan unit sales.

“To get a bit more movement to the inner city,” she said.

McGrath Werribee principal Taney Jain was last week named Residential Salesperson of the Year in the Real Estate Institute of Victoria Awards for Excellence.

Mr Jain said he was both surprised and unsurprised to see Tarneit top the list nationwide, with the area a very large suburb with a significant land sales market for new housing construction.

He added that most sales in the area were going to first-home buyers or to developer-builders.

“And the spec home builders are targeting the first-home buyers with their work, so they are building towards lower price points,” Mr Jain said.

7 Babaco St, Tarneit, is for sale with a $490,000-$530,000 asking price in the Aussie suburb with the most home sale settlements in the past three months.

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Many of the region’s buyers are now recent migrants from the subcontinent, from India and Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, he added.

The agent said he had been surprised he had been named the state’s top real estate agent for a second time, but credited his success to his career mantra that his buyers today would be his sellers in a few years time.

As a result he is now selling the same modest three-bedroom residence at 3B Federal Drive, Wyndham Vale, for the fourth time.

Mr Jain said many first-home buyers in the Tarneit area and across Melbourne’s west responded better to agents who ensured they were looking at homes that made sense for them to purchase, rather than selling them whatever they had listed.

3B Federal Drive, Wyndham Vale, is being sold by the same agent for the fourth time.

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Ray White Craigieburn director Trish Orrico said the suburb had been as busy as she could remember seeing it, with large numbers of investors selling off two- and three-bedroom townhouses and modest homes to predominantly first-home buyers and downsizers.

Ms Orrico said there were also strong sales of older homes on bigger blocks as raised land tax costs “were driving all the investors out”.

The agent noted that there had been a modest resurgence in investor demand in the past few weeks, but almost exclusively from buyers looking from Sydney and Queensland.

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