There’s a Mumbai suburb in Australia!

MELBOURNE - If you are an Indian living in Australia and want to have a feel of being close to home, then all you need to do is to buy a house in one of Melbourne’s newest immigrant suburbs - popularly called Mumbai Cook.

Gordon and Julia de Silva live with their young baby in a two-month-old house in Point Cook’s Alamanda Estate.

Both of them work in the city - Gordon is a financial planner, while Julia works for a bank. While at home or as they go to the local shops, they get the feeling that they are almost in a known country - their country of origin, India.

“We heard that every third or fourth home is of an Indian family, out of the 1,500 homes. We’ve seen a lot of Indians here. In fact, they all call it Mumbai Cook,” Julia was quoted by The Age here as saying.

A new breed of buyers in the city’s real estate market are young, professional, family-oriented and educated migrants, the newspaper said.

The de Silvas chose to buy a house in Point Cook because it was affordable, cosmopolitan, close to the city and had good facilities, says Gordon.

A latest survey of about 3,500 home buyers by the Oliver Hume Real Estate Group shows 10 percent of home buyers in fast growing suburbs were born in India.

Buyers with Chinese and British backgrounds were the next largest group at three percent, closely followed by Sri Lankans at 2.7 percent. The country of origin has little influence on buying habits, the survey found.

With an average of 2,236 people arriving every week in Victoria - 1,800 of those move to Melbourne, and most end up in the new suburbs. In the Dandenong area, 70 percent of the population is of non-Australian origin. In the Sunshine-Brimbank area, the figure touches 67 percent.

While the suburbs deliver affordable housing supply, they don’t necessarily represent the right conditions for strong growth.

But that doesn’t concern Julia. “Point Cook is one of the newest suburbs closest to the city. If you would like to live 19 or 20 km the other side, you would have to really be a millionaire, I guess, to buy a house,” she says.