Buyer's Guide to this Chillingham Neighbourhood
Drew Wade was born at the end of Hopkins Creek which is Chillingham, it's about 30 minutes west of Murwillumbah, It’s one of the little satellite villages.
It’s a popular place to live because of it’s sub tropical climate with exceptionally high rainfall, we’re talking about 2 - 2.5 metres a year, so it’s great for growing.
The local school only has about 60 kids, so it’s a great environment to bring up kids in the country, it’s pretty safe.
Hippies and lifestyle farming
When I was younger it was very much people escaping the burbs, trying to become hippies that sort of thing, living in houses with no walls and doing permaculture and all that stuff but now it’s become a little bit more boutiquey.
You can actually drive through from Murwillumbah through Chillingham and come out at Nerang in QLD.
So there's quite a lot of weekend traffic that goes through from the Gold Coast, it's quite a nice country drive to go through there, there's a lot of hobby farms doing boutique fruit and vegetables, coffees, bananas those sort of things.
So there's a movement away from the original income producing farming into hobby and lifestyle farming.
Young families joining and baby boomer locals
In the area you get two types of residents, you get young families, people in their late 20’s, 30’s and 40’s with kids growing up going to the local schools and high schools and then you’ve got the older sort - mid 50’s to mid 70’s and up - which are original born and bred in the area living on the family farm.
A lot of the time they’re new families moving out from other areas or people coming back - the kids have moved out when they’ve left high school and then they come back in their early 30’s and have their kids here.
Country style housing mixed with modern development
Housing wise, you’re looking at quite country style housing, you’ve got your 2 bedroom with the enclosed verandah and your toilet still on the back deck, old country farm house style type housing and then you’ve the more modern sections that have been subdivided off the old farms where you’ve got your estate style 4 bedrooms 2 bathroom big homes, but I would say there's probably only about 5% of new homes out in that area most of them would be older.
Development potential
You’re no longer allowed to subdivide in NSW unless the balance is 100 acres so you can subdivide 5 acres off 100 but you can’t stick 100 up into 20 acre lots so there's a real limit to the amount of land that's out here.
There’s probably only about 10 vacant blocks left in the area out there and the, because most of the original farm houses, like I said were 2 bedroom, as the modern requirements have improved, you’ll find that people have made a third bedroom and an extra bathroom and then generally a garage.
It’s pretty limited in the realms of development, because there’s not a lot space left that's available to be subdivided so I don’t know that there’ll be a lot changes on the way in that respect.