So I moved from Singleton to Telarah about 3yrs ago. Telarah is a suburb of Maitland and it traces it's birth back to the post '55 time(I think) when flooded houses were moved onto new lots, up on the hill out of the flood waters (my house has river mud in the rafters).

When I moved here there was a couple of small IGA supermarkets and some stereo-typical corner shops and an unrenovated pub.

Since then Coles has built a new supermarket which is open for business. Woolworths & Aldi are putting supermarkets in at the same Rutherford Shopping Centre site. The news agency has been enlarged and a nice shiny new library is nearby. The aforementioned unrenovated Rutherford Hotel has had a face lift and does a brisk trade in Bistro meals.

We also have a massive Bunnings Warehouse store. Mega-stores are great but I have found that if you are renovating an older home Maitland Timber and Hardware sells a better range of Timber, Skirtings and Mouldings suitable for said older homes.

Just a little further West we now have a cluster of mega-stores such as Harvey Norman, Joyce Mayne, Fantastic Furniture, Spotlight and others which I can't remember at the moment.

If you wanted to immigrate from a capital city and move to this area you wouldn't have a problem doing so because the influx of these businesses means you wouldn't be starving your consumerist side.

So from the above I can speculate that the economy may have grown enough to support some new businesses. Hmm I wonder if a hi-end IT Consultancy could flourish?