melindas9

Too many of the reviews on this site are from real estate agents who want you to buy/rent their properties! Ballarat is extremely overrated.

It's not a "country town" and hasn't been for a long time, houses here are NOT affordable anymore. The roads are poor quality, a lot of streets have no footpaths, many of the buildings are run-down and dirty.

The demographic here is not good. Too many bogans using drugs and alcohol in public. Packs of jobless teenagers wander around at night, where are their parents? Lots of hoons speeding and doing burnouts especially on main roads near pubs.

Public transport in Ballarat is a joke: the bus service is extremely unreliable, with buses often showing up late OR they show up early and don't wait.

The V/Line train service isn't frequent enough. Too often they run a 3-car train instead of a 6-car train, meaning it is constantly over-crowded. Of course, this is all assuming you even get a train to begin with, every other week the line goes down with coach replacements, so it often takes over 2 hours to get to Melbourne!

And of course, the weather in Ballarat is terrible. Freezing cold, rainy, windy, but also susceptible to horrible heat waves.

Hugely overrated area, don't buy into the hype.

Ignore the spam real estate agent review here. Eureka is not a separate town, it's just an subdivision located entirely inside of Ballarat East. The reason it's separated is purely historical, because it's where the Eureka Rebellion happened back in the 1800s. See the reviews for Ballarat East instead.

Ever since the pandemic Ballarat East is not really affordable anymore like it used to be. A lot of streets have no footpaths, so you have to either walk in the grass or on the road. Speaking of, Ballarat East has a lot of neglected roads, but that's something all of this region is infamous for. Some very beautiful well-maintained houses, right next to run-down houses with unkempt yards. Some sketchy people are present in the area, have noticed a few packs of teenage boys wandering the streets at night. Bus services are often very late, or come early and don't stop until the scheduled time. Almost no nightlife.