With city-based families fighting to buy homes in the twin towns, even local schools are benefiting, with Echuca College seeing its biggest single year jump in enrolments — up 60 students in 2021.
Which means more teachers, more jobs and more families relocating here.
The local real estate industry can’t get houses onto the market fast enough — last week a new four-bedroom home at 89 Hare St sold for a whopping $1 million — attracting bidders from Sydney and Melbourne.
And the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures confirm COVID-19 has seen a growing diaspora of metropolitan families across regional Victoria.
And the twin towns are proving the perfect place for a tree change — for all their local amenities, and Echuca is still the river town closest to the capital.
Charles L King principal Gary Wood said demand was split evenly between locals and those wanting to move here.
“It’s not just established homes which are being snapped up. People are choosing to buy blocks of lands because they are happy to wait for the land to be developed,” Mr Wood said.
“I can’t see the demand slowing down anytime soon.”
Elders Residential principal Dean Costello said the interest in a standard four-bedroom home, with two bathrooms and a double garage, highlighted what agents were dealing with.
“When we’re listing these homes, we’re receiving more than 20 inquiries within 24 hours,” he said.
“In some cases, we’ve had examples where homes are being sold within a day. People are coming from both metropolitan and other regional communities.”
Echuca College said it had jumped from about 760 students in 2020 to 820 this year.
Principal Simon Wood described the jump as “fantastic” and showed an increase in most year levels.
“Part of the reason is we’ve had a small group of year 12s graduate, but then we’ve had more than 160 year 7s enroll, which is great,” Mr Wood said.
“I think these new students are coming from a range of places . . . but there are people seeking a regional lifestyle and moving away from the city and that’s certainly caused some of the increase.
“Such a big jump in enrolments meant the college had been able to employ more staff and offer more opportunities for students.
“We’ve increased our class numbers for years 7, 8 and 9 from six classes to seven; and that’s meant we needed to employ more staff, so we now have a wide range of skill sets across the board.
“We have also employed a lot of staff who have moved up from Melbourne, and that’s a huge change for them.”
Worklocker Echuca is busy trying to keep up with demand for uniforms.
“We’ve been extremely busy this year, I would nearly say it’s our biggest year to date,” owner Jaime Lake said.
“We were inundated with orders before Christmas and even when we got back from the holiday period we’ve been trying really hard to keep up.
“Parents would usually hold off on buying uniforms for another year, but because they haven’t been at school for 12 months, they’re getting in and buying them now.”
Not only have thousands of people abandoned Melbourne for regional Victoria, the traditionally high number of people leaving country areas has been halved, with nearly 500 more people aged 15-24 staying put compared to the same time last year — possibly boosted by many university courses moving online during the pandemic.
Echuca police Senior Sergeant Mick Carroll said it was great to see an increase in people moving to the community from Melbourne, many of whom were police officers.
“We have always been very lucky at Echuca in that we have no shortage of police officers wanting to work here,” he said.
“There is currently a lengthy list of members waiting for positions to become vacant, which is something of which we are really proud.
“The other stations in our police service area, such as Kyabram, Rochester and Rushworth, are also all fully staffed, with positions filled quickly when they do become vacant.”
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