Australia's most expensive houses

If you want to know where Australia’s rich live, it will probably come as no surprise that Sydney tops the list.Perth and Melbourne are a distant second and third behind the harbour city which has 19 of Australia's most expensive 25 suburbs, according to the RP Data. Perth has three, Melbourne two and Eagle Bay in Western Australia's Margaret River region also gets a top 25 ranking.As in most parts of the world our rich tend to live close to the center of town and if not close to the water.Why? Because the rich can afford the convenience.Sydney’s Point Piper, around 4 kilometres form the CBD tops the list with a median value of $7.382 million.With only 11 streets, including the richest in Australia - Wolseley Road – it has only 148 detached houses and 57 percent of them are owned outright (that is without a mortgage).Not surprisingly Point Piper residents have the highest average incomes in the nation, averaging just over $182,000.Second on the list of expensive suburbs, with an average home price of $6.5 million, is Watson's Bay, only seven kilometres away from Sydney’s city center. In third place is Centennial Park, followed by Woolwich - both in Sydney.Perth's Peppermint Grove takes fifth spot, where median values are $4.3 million, while a typical mansion in Toorak, Melbourne’s top suburb, a can be bought for a measly $2.8 million.Tim Lawless, research director for RPData said suburbs on the property rich list tended be in areas near the central business district, close to the water, or featured houses with a heritage value or houses perched on larger blocks of land.Only three of the top 25 most expensive suburbs are further than 10 kilometres from the capital city central business district.It’s no coincidence that the population living in these most expensive 25 suburbs accounts for just 0.5 per cent of Australia's total population.