A NEW report has revealed Lake Macquarie and Maitland among the hotspots in Australia for people leaving major cities to live in regional areas.
Lake Macquarie placed seventh in a list of the top 10 most popular destinations for net internal migration, with a 3.3 per cent share in Australia from the 12 months to March 2023.
Maitland came in at ninth position with a 3 per cent share, according to The Regional Movers Index.
The report by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the Regional Australia Institute analyses the quarterly and annual trends in people moving to and from Australia's regional areas.
Eleebana resident Dan Norris made the move from Sydney's Northern Beaches to Lake Macquarie two years ago with his wife and two young children.
He said rising property prices in Sydney and seeking a better lifestyle for their kids led to their decision to purchase a home in the region.
"We really wanted to create an environment for our young children that allowed for growth and prosperity where mum and dad weren't leveraged so heavily into the Sydney property market," Mr Norris said.
"It felt like the right sort of place to be."
Mr Norris said the move was "the best thing we've ever done."
"We have had a couple of Sydney friends since follow us and we have an excellent community with the local school and it's a great place to be," he said.
"We absolutely saw value in the area and in more than a monetary sense, we saw value in a lifestyle sense.
"Lake Macquarie offered us everything we wanted."
Lake Macquarie-based selling agent Kathleen Matinlassi of Stone Real Estate said the trend of out-of-area buyers relocating to the region had continued in the wake of the pandemic.
She said that of the 75 properties that she had sold this year in the region, around 35 per cent of those were not from the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie area.
"Families had been slowly discovering Lake Macquarie and what it had to offer and then the onset of the pandemic brought that more into focus," Mrs Matinlassi said.
"Now, over the last year because of the interest rate rises and pressure on city mortgages, Lake Macquarie is in their sights again because they get the high standard of living with half of the mortgage cost.
"It has brought on a new wave of young families coming to the area."
The Regional Movers Index, which uses bank data to track internal migration, shows that capital-to-regional migration has risen 7.9 per cent in the last quarter, its third-highest level in the past five years.
Figures tracking movements between regional Australia and the capital cities show former Sydney residents make up 90 per cent of net migration away from the cities, a jump from an average 61 per cent.
While more people in Sydney and Melbourne are heading for a life in regional areas, the number of people moving from regional to the cities is also at its highest point in five years.
The Commonwealth Bank's head of regional and agribusiness Paul Fowler said the demand for workers and competition for skilled labour was driving greater population movement across Australia.
"With both strong city-to-regions movement and regions-to-city movement, the overall level of mobility is at record levels," Mr Fowler said.
"We see that as a positive factor for the economy."
Regional Australia Institute (RAI) CEO Liz Ritchie said the results speak to the trend it is seeing on the ground of an increasingly mobile population in the wake of more job flexibility.
Ms Ritchie said with more moving to the regions, than back the other way, the bigger coastal centres remained popular but there was an increasing appetite to move further afield to smaller regional areas.
And there are no signs regional areas will fall out of favour anytime soon, Ms Ritchie said.
"Recent RAI research shows one-in-five metropolitan Australians are wanting to make the move to regional Australia with the cost of living cited as the key reason as people try and source more affordable housing and a way of living," she said.
"Cost of living pressures are also boosting greater movement within the regions themselves, as regional movers also search out places with more available and affordable housing."
