Spending Up in the 2023-24 Financial Year
Over the past 12 months spending in the City of Melton has been following a steady growth pattern with a spike at Christmas followed by a dip and a second, smaller spike around the Easter holiday period, which is typically followed by a steady climb though winter.
The spending growth in the City of Melton is sustained by both its growing population, an increase in buying options from the number of local businesses, along with increasing demand from residents and businesses from outside of the city’s boundaries.
The expenditure charts below illustrate how each expenditure category, available for tracking in our Spendmapp reports, has performed over the past 12 months and in previous years.
It is important to note that the data does not include ATM withdrawals, business-to-business EFT transactions, mortgage/rent, utilities, insurance, tax payments and certain other transactions.
Total Local Spend (TLS)
The total amount spent with merchants within the Melton City Council Local Government Area (LGA) has shown an upwards trend over the past two years.
If we analyse the data tables behind the above graph and compare the accumulated TLS numbers for each of the past two financial years, we can see that TLS has grown from $2.340B in FY22-23 to $2.585B in FY23-24.
This represents a healthy growth in TLS of 10.4%.
For comparison purposes Spendmapp’s National Tracker data shows an increase of 2.6% for the same period.
It is worth noting however that from February to June this year, TLS has shown higher volatility than in the previous year with monthly gains in March and May reversed in each of the following months.
This is likely a sign of pressure on household budgets and it will be interesting to see how this trend continues to develop over the coming months.
If your sales have been stagnant or ‘up and down’ lately, this may provide some level of consolation as it suggests that other businesses in your area or industry are likely to feel the same effects.
As always, we encourage businesses to reach out to the Venture Melton team for tailored analysis and advice on where to find business support and training opportunities.
If you are a regular reader of our Spendmapp reports that you will know that TLS is made up of Resident Local Spend and Visitor Local Spend. Let’s take a look at how each of those two expenditure types contributed to TLS.
Resident and Visitor Local Spend
The amount spent by residents and local businesses with merchants inside the Melton City Council LGA, Resident Local Spend (RLS), has been trending up over the past two years.
The RLS timeseries above shows a pattern that is similar to the TLS chart. In taking a closer look at the underlying RLS data tables, we can see an increase of 8.9% per annum over the last two financial years, from $1.564B in FY22-23 to $1.703B in FY23-24.
When looking at the other expenditure type that is part of TLS, we can see that Visitor Local Spend (VLS), the amount spent by non-residents and non-local businesses with merchants inside the Melton City Council LGA, has been growing at a healthy rate.
VLS enjoyed strong growth from April 2023 onwards and reached a December peak of $86.9M for the month of December, before falling sharply and slowly gaining new momentum from January until July this year, with similar relative volatility as RLS.
In absolute numbers VLS increased from $776.23M in FY22-23 to $881.71M in FY 23-24. This growth of 13.6% in VLS indicates a healthy level of activity in the visitor economy and amongst businesses that export to or provide services in areas outside of our LGA.
Marketing via Melton City Much More, Western Melbourne Tourism and the development of new activity centres, commercial and industrial areas are contributing factors behind this trend.
VLS now makes up 34.1% of Total Local Spend, up 0.9 percentage points from 33.2% in the previous (22-23) financial year.
Resident Online Spending (ROS)
The amount spent by Melton City Council LGA residents and local businesses with online merchants, both within the City of Melton and outside of the LGA, has increased marginally but remains at an overall high level.
Online spending has grown significantly in recent years and is popular with Melton residents, with almost 32c cents in the dollar spent online (resident wallet share 32%).
In absolute terms Melton residents spent $1.903B online in the 2022-23 financial year and $1.978B in the 2023-24 financial year. This increase of ~4% is comparatively lower than the growth rate of Resident Local Spend (+8.9%) which could be explained by general pressure on households, and reduction in discretionary spending. Discretionary expenditure, along with Services & Other expenditure (not classified as consumer staples), makes up a large part of online transactions.
In the 2023-24 financial year the top five expenditure categories in Resident Online Spending were, in descending order, Specialised and Luxury Goods ($383m), Dining and Entertainment ($347m), Professional Services ($277m), Other ($273m) and Travel ($266m). As a combined total, these categories represent $1.546 or ~78% of all ROS.
Business Growth in the City of Melton
Businesses can be confident that they will continue to benefit from the strong population growth in the City of Melton, of 6.6% from June 2022 to June 2023, resulting in an estimated resident population of 206,070 as of 30 June 2023. Data provided by Melton City Council’s data provider .id (informed decisions) indicates the population will grow to 232,000 in 2024.
The ongoing and strong population growth is attracting new investors, as well as providing incentives for existing businesses to expand to meet the needs of a growing population.
Evidence of this can be found by looking at the increase in the number of actively trading businesses, which jumped from 15403 in 2022 to 15629 in 2023 (+1.5%).
Investment Opportunities and Support
If you would like to find out more about local investment opportunities, the Venture Melton team would love to hear from you. Our team will be able to provide you with Spendmapp data that can be tailored to your industry or specific locations. We can also make introductions to local real estate and development sector stakeholders or facilitate pre-application meetings with representatives from the City Growth and Development team.
You can contact us by completing the online form on the Venture Melton website.
Disclaimer
All data has been sourced from Spendmapp by Geografia for Melton City Council. Any use of material should be appropriately cited (i.e. source: Spendmapp by Geografia). While every effort is made to provide accurate and complete information, Geografia does not warrant or represent that the information contained is free from errors or omissions and accepts no responsibility for any loss, damage, cost or expense (whether direct or indirect) incurred as a result of a person taking action in respect to any representation, statement, or advice referred to in this report.