Ongoing and future relationships of second home owners with places in coastal Australia : an empirical case study from Eastern Victoria

Many of Australia's second homes are located in peripheral locations along the coast, away from suburbia and cities. Many of these areas have specific challenges relating to a declining or consolidating agricultural sector and the need to diversify economies in a climate of uncertainty. This offers specific challenges for coastal local governments, who are often resource poor, managing transitional economies with unclear futures in terms of current and projected populations. This article begins with this broad landscape and focuses on two south-eastern Victorian coastal areas that are known second home hotspots. Our article presents the findings of a residential survey conducted in Inverloch and Philip Island that specifically captured second home owners to discover who they are, why they have a second home in that area, what local area concerns they have, and what they intend to do with their second homes in the future. Within the limitations of our data, we find ambivalence among second home owners as a group, supporting the scholarship that identifies the difficulties of pinning this phenomenon down. That said, there are some discernible patterns among second home owners, particularly when they are put in contrast with the permanent residents of these communities.