Yarra — LGA Conditions Intelligence

Yarra recorded negative net internal migration in every one of the four years to 2024-25 — the only LGA built in this series where that holds for all four years rather than three or fewer. But the scale is the story here, not the direction: cumulative four-year net of just -3,599 sits against 38,519 arrivals and 42,118 departures, a combined gross flow equal to 79.6% of Yarra’s own 2025 population — the highest churn intensity of any populous LGA checked nationally in building this card. The year-by-year pattern is noisy rather than trending: a sharp -1,800 in 2021-22 (both arrivals and departures elevated, consistent with Melbourne’s COVID-era inner-city exodus and rebound), narrowing to essentially zero (-29) in 2022-23, then -649 and -1,121 in the two most recent years. Arrivals and departures have both fallen by roughly a third since 2021-22 as the post-lockdown churn spike has unwound, with neither side clearly overtaking the other.

Yarra’s four-phase shape carries two distinct findings. First, its Stall phase (2009–2016, +20.2%) outgrew its Boom phase (2001–2009, +12.8%) — the third LGA built in this series (after Darwin and the ACT) where the two earliest phases invert the standard boom/stall pattern, consistent with a 2010s inner-Melbourne apartment-building wave outpacing the 2000s. Second, and found nowhere else in this series: Yarra’s Recovery phase (2016–2021, -1.5%) is negative — a small pre-COVID population contraction, not a pandemic artefact, since the 2021 count already reflects it. ERP has still grown 47.9% overall since 2001 (68,522 → 101,356), with the Current phase (+10.7%) the strongest since Stall.

Combined population change in 2024-25 (-1,121 internal + 554 natural + 2,001 overseas = 1,434 persons, ≈598 implied households at 2.4 persons/household) is comfortably covered by the 1,046 dwelling approvals recorded the same year — unlike some faster-growing LGAs built earlier in this series where approvals trailed demand, Yarra’s approval pipeline keeps pace with net population growth once the small internal-migration loss is accounted for. The population-components reconciliation checks exact: -3,599 (internal) + 2,018 (natural increase) + 11,416 (overseas) = 9,835, matching the ERP change (91,521 → 101,356, 2021 → 2025) to the last person. Net overseas migration alone (+11,416) is more than triple the total population gain — it is comfortably offsetting the small, persistent internal-migration loss, not merely supplementing growth from another source.

The Census unoccupied dwelling rate counts dwellings recorded as unoccupied on Census night — it is not a market vacancy rate; at 15.0% it is second only to Mandurah’s 17.1% reading in this series, though the likely driver is different (inner-city investor/short-stay apartment stock rather than Mandurah’s holiday-home pattern). Yarra sets new series highs on employed share (63.4%, well ahead of Darwin’s prior high of 54.8%), high-income share (25.8%, ahead of the ACT’s 22.1%), and renting (53.4%, ahead of Darwin’s 49.0%) — alongside the lowest child share recorded in this series so far (10.6% aged 0-14). This is a young, working, renting, high-income, childless population profile, distinct in kind from the retirement-skewed and young-family profiles built elsewhere in this series.

• Bedrock figure is population-weighted, not a simple average of suburbs. Readings are on APN Bedrock™ methodology v1.1. Yarra’s population-eligible localities (96,378 residents across 12 localities) produce a population-weighted mean of 58.4 on node 24110. A simple, unweighted average gives 60.1 instead — a 1.7-point gap, with the weighted figure lower (the LGA’s more populous localities score somewhat lower on Bedrock than its smaller ones), the same direction as the gap found on several other LGAs in this series though smaller in size. This card uses the population-weighted figure, consistent with the platform’s existing LGA-rollup convention.
• Classification badge is indicative, and deliberately avoids this series’ own “Reversing” label despite Yarra’s net internal migration being negative in all four years. A literal reading of “net migration turning negative, departure-led” would put Yarra in the same bucket as this series’ genuinely shrinking LGAs — but Yarra’s population grew by 9,835 over the same period. “High Churn” is used instead, reflecting the defining feature of Yarra’s data: gross flow equal to 79.6% of ERP against a near-zero net effect. The platform’s formal 4-way classification query has not been ratified.
• No crime/safety data included in this version. APN Sentinel™ crime-pillar data (node 24121/24122) exists at suburb grain nationally but carries open, jurisdiction-specific data-quality caveats not yet resolved platform-wide — deliberately excluded from this card rather than presented with unresolved caveats attached.
• Demographic profile is 2021 Census vintage. Given Yarra’s high churn and the scale of overseas migration since 2021 (+11,416 over four years, more than 11% of the 2021 population), the 2021 profile may understate the current renter/high-turnover share further still — the underlying trend, not the exact percentages, is the more durable read.
• Card format approved 19 August 2026; the Bedrock population-weighting convention used above was adopted platform-wide in October 2026.