Best Cairns suburbs for owner-occupiers

Bayview Heights tops the list, with 83.5% of its occupied dwellings owner-occupied. Across the ranking, owner-occupier shares run from 63.2% to 83.5%. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 31 eligible Cairns suburbs.

Each eligible Cairns suburb is scored on four factors: 55% owner-occupier share (the share of occupied dwellings owned outright or with a mortgage, from the ABS 2021 census, ranked as a percentile within Cairns), 25% residential stability (low dwelling churn between the 2016 and 2021 censuses), 10% walkability, and 10% safety (bushfire, crime and flood risks combined).

A dwelling lived in by its owner — whether owned outright or with a mortgage — as opposed to rented. The figure is the owner-occupied share of all tenure-classified occupied private dwellings in the ABS 2021 census, and it's the exact complement of the rental share our investor ranking uses.

A suburb needs a resident population of at least 1,000 and a 2021 census tenure record. Suburbs below the threshold or missing census tenure data are excluded, not penalised, so the ranking isn't dominated by tiny outliers.

The top 15 is recomputed whenever the underlying data refreshes. Tenure comes from the ABS census (every five years); the growth and safety inputs refresh alongside their own datasets.