Baby boomers are being for living in too-big houses for too long. But big houses appear to be the province of Canberrans.
Canberra has been named the world leader when it comes to largest average home size at a whopping 256.3 square metres, according to analysis by UK firm Buildworld.
That’s 560 per cent more floor space than bottom-ranked Moscow, where the average was just 45.5 square metres, and 36 per cent bigger than Cairo, which landed in second place at 188 square metres.
“It’s surprising, but it’s not overly surprising,” said Josh Yewdall, from Belle Property Canberra, who is currently selling an “enormous” five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in the southern suburb of Gordon.
Kostya Logvinov, from Town Residential, says “the dream in Canberra is to have a big house”.
“When Canberra was first introduced,they had to entice people from Sydney and Melbourne to move to be public servants.
“One of the ways they did that was to sell this dream of a very family-friendly city where you could have a big house with a big backyard, raise a family.”
Buildworld’s analysis was based on a country-by-country analysis of property listings and manual research, collecting data up to October 2022.
The top-10 capital cities with largest homes were: Canberra – 256.3sqm, Cairo (Egypt) – 188sqm, Tripoli (Libya) –180sqm, Amman (Jordan) – 170sqm, Ottawa (Canada) – 163.8sqm, Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) – 160.1sqm, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) – 158.4sqm, Jakarta (Indonesia) – 157sqm, Manila (Philippines) – 155sqm and Abu Dhabi (UAE) – 153.4sqm.