With an estimated population of 23.79 million – as of April 14, 2015, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) – Australia isn’t exactly over-serviced by financial planners.
Estimates of the number of advisers vary, and are notoriously unreliable, but a generally accepted figure of about 18,000 means there’s plenty of space, and clients, to go around.
Even so, not all places in this wide brown land are necessarily equally attractive as places to be a financial planner. And groundbreaking new research conducted for Professional Planner by CoreData Consulting for the first time ranks 85 different regions across the country for their potential as locations for financial planning practices.
From Mandurah in the west to Wide Bay in the east, and from Hobart in the south to Darwin in the north, CoreData has created the Adviser Market Opportunity Index (click on the image, left, to read the full methodology article), based on a range of factors that determine the supply of and demand for financial planning services.
It weights these factors, and then applies them to 85 separate regions defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) as Statistical Areas Level 4 (SA4). These are regions that typically have populations of between 100,000 and 300,000 in regional areas, and between 300,000 and 500,000 in metropolitan areas.
The index factors are then combined with data sourced from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) records on authorised representatives to build up a picture of each region.
The CoreData analysis shows some areas are more attractive – according to the index factors – than others, which represents useful guidance to individual financial planners seeking to establish a new practice or relocate an existing one, and to licensees seeking to expand their financial planning networks.
Professional Planner has published an interactive PDF of the Adviser Opportunity Index, which gives a deeper insight into the factors that make up the index, and how selected regions rate across the country fare on those factors. Click on the image below to download the PDF (best viewed in Adobe Acrobat).
