The Property Council of Queensland is pleading for Council to work with the State Government to find ways to boost housing supply amid concerning new data.
Fresh research out today has revealed the Gold Coast had never reached its current attached dwelling targets, as set out under the South-East Queensland Regional Plan, and was unlikely to for the foreseeable future.
According to the report, around 58 per cent of apartments due for completion in 2027-2028 were at moderate or high risk of delay or withdrawal.
“The further we fall behind our housing targets the greater the deficit grows and the more challenging it will be to make inroads into our housing crisis,” Property Council Queensland Executive Director Jess Caire said.
“Under the regional plan, the Gold Coast needs to deliver around 5,643 attached dwellings per year between 2021 and 2031. But since 2019, the city has fallen well short of these targets, delivering less than a third of this target annually.
“This reinforces the scale of the challenge that the Gold Coast has in front of it and the need for bold yet considered policy, simply put if nothing changes, nothing changes.
“These issues are not isolated to the Gold Coast, the delivery of attached product remains challenging right across Queensland”.
Tax settings, rising construction costs and labour shortages are being blamed.
“Large-scale attached product is exactly what we need to build to overcome our housing deficit, but this is also the product that is the most challenging to deliver in the current high-cost environment,” Ms Caire said.
“The delivery of these projects is being hamstrung by soaring construction costs, shrinking productivity, labour shortages and tax settings that make deals unviable before they start”.
The Gold Coast saw a solid uptick in new projects coming to market throughout 2024, but according to Urbis, there’s a “real risk that this will decline over the remainder of 2025”.
“A reduction in new product will only exacerbate the demand/supply gap, with the real impact being felt over the coming years for both purchasers and renters,” Urbis Director Paul Riga said.
The Property Council is now calling for a suite of policy interventions to support the delivery of new housing.
One of those includes incentivizing local governments to pull all available levers to fast track housing supply via fast tracking planning changes and providing infrastructure charges relief for critical projects.
They’ve also called for the State to leverage the upcoming review of the regional plans to ensure we embed the practice of coordinating planning and infrastructure delivery, an annual commitment in the budget to unlock catalytic infrastructure, and for the State to even out the playing field for Australian-based developers by reviewing the application of Queensland’s foreign tax framework.
