The Bin Index: Our Trick for Reading Holiday Suburbs on the Central Coast

Okay, here us out…
If you walk a street on bin night, it’ll give you an idea of who’s living there.  

That’s the whole theory. We call it the Bin Index. It may sound ridiculous, but we think there’s some merit in it. 

 

So why bins? 

Every suburb has a bin collection night. On that night, owner-occupiers put their bins out because that’s what owner-occupiers do every single week, holidays or not. Holiday homes only put there bins out when someone’s staying there. 

So, if you walk a street on collection night, or early the next morning, and count the bins that are out on the kerb, you’re giving yourself an idea of the occupancy of that street. A street with bins on the kerbside of every second or third house in the middle of a random week in July tells a very different story to a street lined with bins over summertime. 

It’s just an easy way to get a feel of a street’s rhythm. 

 

The perfect case study – Tudibaring Parade, MacMasters Beach 

This is a beachfront street with some of the most sought-after real estate on the Central Coast, sitting next to the Bouddi Peninsula with the beach on one side and Cockrone Lagoon on the other. 

Walk it outside school holidays and it’s quiet. Walk it over the Christmas break and it fills up fast, driveways are packed with cars, there are families meandering down the road to the beach and bins in front of houses that were sitting empty a few weeks earlier. That shift can give you an idea of whether or not there’s a meaningful share of holiday homes in the area over full-time residences.  

The cars and foot traffic can tell you how many day-trippers are up, the bins will tell you who’s staying. And for a buyer, a holiday-home-heavy street behaves differently to an owner-occupier street.  

 

Why this matters when you’re buying 

Say you’re after a lifestyle property to live in full-time. A street that’s three-quarters holiday homes might mean long stretches of the year where half your neighbours simply aren’t there. Some buyers may love the quiet periods but may also find the sudden influx of holiday makers to the street overwhelming during the peak season. 

Say you’re buying as an investor. Now that same holiday-heavy street is exactly what you want, because it tells you the market has already proven itself as a holiday letting location. 

 

Where else we use the Bin Index on the Central Coast 

We see the same pattern across most of our classic holiday hot spots. In southern suburbs like Patonga, Pearl Beach, Killcare. Northern suburbs like The Entrance and Blue Bay. As well as our central beachside suburbs like Copacabana, Avoca Beach, and pockets of Terrigal.  

These are markets where weekenders sit alongside full-time residential streets. 

 

Just a theory, not a science 

As Buyers Agents, we’re not relying on bin night as a strategy. Each of our team members have a core focus area of the Central Coast, meaning we know these streets intimately. But it’s a fast, free and useful gut check that you can use when looking at a home. 

If you want to check when bin night is on any street in the Central Coast, you can do so here. 

 

 

If you’re weighing up a holiday suburb on the Central Coast and want a clearer read on what you’re actually buying into, get in touch with the Bryson Buyers Agents team.

We’ll walk the street with you, bin night or not.