Anybody waiting for house prices to drop in the regions may be in for a rude shock - one real estate expert believes they will not drop to pre-pandemic levels.
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In the past five years housing prices along the V/Line route from Gisborne to Echuca - which includes Bendigo and Castlemaine - have almost doubled in price.
In Bendigo, where the median house price sat at $392,500 in 2018, they have risen to $595,000.
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However, real estate agent and owner of Mark O'Shea Realty, Mark O'Shea, said this might not be a bad thing.
"Real estate is a market - they call it a market for a reason," he said.
"It goes up and down according to economic pressures so pretty much everyone is under pressure - we have all heard about the interest rate hikes.
"In general terms that is pretty traditional."
Mr O'Shea said if you were to follow the train-line up from the capital, where prices for a house have exploded to the million-dollar mark, you would find the Central Goldfields was still very attainable for housing.
'Bendigo is cheap, Bendigo is still underpriced.'
He said given the vast array of facilities in terms of health, education and social life, Bendigo was undervalued.
"Bendigo is cheap, Bendigo is still underpriced," Mr O'Shea said.
"If you want to compare apples with apples, compare Bendigo to Ballarat, or if you want to bring it closer, go down and see what people are paying for a house in Castlemaine.
"And it seems to get dearer and dearer each train stop (towards Melbourne)."
The real estate expert said there was a massive growth in prices during COVID-19 for various reasons, including people being able to borrow more money from banks because of low interest rates.
This allowed them to spend more on a home.
'Your biggest competition is your neighbour'
Mr O'Shea said another driver for property value was other houses in an area.
"If you get the property priced right, the buyers are in tune with the market because whoever is looking to buy a property today is doing their research," he said.
"If someone is wanting to buy a home today they know exactly which homes have sold and what they have sold for in the area they are searching.
"That is the coaching they are getting from banks, that is the coaching they are getting from financial advisers ... your biggest competition is your neighbour."
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Mr O'Shea said trying to predict the market was a "fool's game", but that he could almost say with certainty that the prices of homes would not drop to pre-pandemic levels.
He said it might be daunting at first glance but historically housing prices had also gone up and would continue to go up.
"In general terms property prices always go up," he said.
"They will go up, they will go down, they will go flatline. If you got the data and did the research and looked at a 10 to 20-year snapshot of Bendigo property prices, you will find Bendigo property prices grow somewhere in a normal market around five per cent a year on average. I don't see that changing."
Mr O'Shea said there were so "many pieces of the domino" which made up the housing market it was impossible to say what the future held for homebuyers.
But the days of underpriced Bendigo houses are numbered.
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