WHAT do you call someone who moves to the Gold Coast's suburbs? It's not a "sea changer", according to researcher Michael Matusik. Living on the Gold Coast, with its 500,000 other inhabitants and doing the same sort of job that you did in Sydney or Melbourne, is not the quite life changing, dangling the feet in the ocean move made by Sigrid Thornton's character in the ABC television series SeaChange.
Matusik partly blames developers for labelling projects located somewhere vaguely near the ocean with the "sea change" tag. His take is that this markets a lifestyle that doesn't exist and misleads potential purchasers who not only expect a life metamorphosis, but rocketing price growth to boot.
The rapidly rising value of seaside locations around Australia has meant most buyers are priced out of owning a home where the beach is in their backyard.
What many sea changers end up with, he argues, is a very ordinary house in a very ordinary suburb.
So is the sea change phenomenon a furphy for most buyers? Demographer Bernard Salt thinks that Australians are not that dumb.
"We can work out if a house is on the beach or not," he says.
Salt regards sea change as more about a life philosophy than about geography.
He points out that developers and real estate agents will call on whatever factors they can, emotional and factual, to make a sale.
If there is mass trend then there is bound to be a reality TV show about it.
Next month Channel Seven kicks off The Real Seachange.
"Some will fail. Some will never look back. Some will find new love and prosperity. Some will watch their life savings disappear," trumpets Seven's publicity for the show.
Like The Block, is it heralding a trend that's overdone, overpriced and on the way out?
The series' ratings will probably provide a clue as to whether Australians are bored to death with sea change. It may also be a bellwether as to the long-term outlook for that holiday-house investment.
In some of the country's key coastal locations prices rocketed ahead until a year or two ago, then caught the malaise affecting most city prices.
Agent PRDnationwide found a big difference between average annual increases over the past five years compared with what happened last year.
For the Gold Coast it was 15.5 per cent growth dropping to 1 per cent last year; on the Sunshine Coast 19.2 per cent and 1.1 per cent; Portsea was 6 per cent and negative 19.1 per cent last year; and Byron Bay went from 17.7 per cent annual price rises over five years to 1.2 per cent last year.
Despite the slowing prices and a somewhat tarnished moniker, sea change has a lot of life in it yet.
Salt notes that there is 16,000km of coastline and people still want to live by the beach. "Its a harder market to oversupply," he says.
The lesson: If you are buying "sea change property" make sure it at least has a water glimpse.
Matusik has begun questioning whether the increasing chunk of the population who have up and moved to the coast have simply exchanged one form of suburbia for another.
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