Willoughby buyers agent

About the suburb

Willoughby at a glance

Willoughby is about eight kilometres north of the city, in the City of Willoughby, with Chatswood, North Willoughby, Middle Cove, Castlecrag, Artarmon, Naremburn and Northbridge around it. It covers about 1.6 square kilometres and has 11 parks.

Houses and apartments are roughly evenly split, and about two in three homes are lived in by their owners. More than half of households are couples with children, and the most common age group is 40 to 49.

Houses and apartments both come up through the year, so there is choice in each, and the street matters as much as the suburb.

The origin of the name is uncertain; one account says Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell named it after Sir James Willoughby Gordon. Settled from the 1850s, it was home to the Channel 9 studios and TV tower for decades. The tower came down from 2021, and the former studio site is to be redeveloped with 460 new homes. The 1934 incinerator designed by Walter Burley Griffin is heritage-listed, and Flat Rock Gully has bushland walking tracks down to Long Bay. Artarmon station, on the western border, is the nearest.

The trade-offs are worth saying plainly. The Gore Hill Freeway runs along the southern border, so noise varies from street to street. The redevelopment of the former Channel 9 site will bring construction and more traffic to the streets around it for some years. And the apartments range from older walk-ups to new buildings, so the building matters as much as the street.