What's Really Happening in the Fraser Coast Property Market

Fraser Coast Property Brief Episode 2 takes a clear look at what is happening in the local property market, and why the Fraser Coast is tracking differently to national trends.

While headlines suggest a slowing market across Australia, this episode explains why the Fraser Coast continues to show strong momentum. Host Glen Winney breaks down the key forces shaping the region and what they mean for the next five to ten years.

The episode starts with the biggest driver of all property markets, population growth. The Fraser Coast continues to attract people from New South Wales and Victoria, along with retirees and remote workers. This steady movement creates ongoing demand for housing, rentals, services, and commercial space, which then drives further growth across the region.

Glen then explains the reality behind housing supply. New land and housing cannot be delivered quickly. Development involves planning approvals, infrastructure, engineering, environmental considerations, and financial feasibility. These steps take years, which creates a gap between rising demand and available supply.

Construction costs are another major factor. Labour shortages, higher material costs, insurance, and compliance have all increased the cost to build. This has changed the economics of development, meaning projects must be carefully assessed before they proceed, and supply cannot simply increase overnight.

The episode also explores the commercial property market. Industrial property is seeing strong demand, while retail and office sectors continue to adapt to changing behaviour and work patterns. Commercial activity often reflects business confidence and provides early signals of economic movement in the region.

Infrastructure is highlighted as a key influence on future growth. Road upgrades, airport expansion, tourism investment, and planning decisions all shape where and how the region develops. Strategic infrastructure can unlock new areas for development and drive long-term value.

Looking ahead, Glen positions the Fraser Coast within a broader Queensland growth corridor. Population growth, lifestyle migration, and ongoing investment continue to support long-term demand. While property markets move in cycles, the underlying fundamentals in this region remain strong.

This episode gives you a grounded view of the local market, helping you understand what is driving change and how to think about property decisions in the Fraser Coast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Fraser Coast Property Brief, the podcast where property, development, and business leaders share what's really happening across the Fraser Coast. This episode brings you insights into local projects, market trends, and the people helping shape the future of our region. Welcome. What's really happening on the Fraser Coast property market? This is going to be our story today, and I want to give you a bit of background of how we got to where we are now, what's happening, and how we're going to go forward from here. So I'm really going to go back to the start of COVID. It actually blew this market away and put us on a trajectory that we've never seen before. In the 40 years I've been here, I've been through peaks and troughs, booms, but what's happened since COVID has been consistent, it's been growing and it's not slowing down. You might hear stories around the Australian market, things are slowing, interest rates going up again, but we're not seeing it here on the ground. Main reason is people are still driving towards the reasons. So let's let's talk about the population growth to start with. Harvey Bay has got an amazing population growth, and the Fraser Coast in general is growing. So we've got about 68,000 people here in Harvey Bay, and we've got about 120,000 people here on the Fraser Coast. We're growing at about 2.5% a year, and we're probably the last two or three years about 2,700, 2,800 people per annum, and it's still happening year after year. So there's some statistics within the statistics here. Firstly, our population is aging, which is a concern. So we've got an average age of 51 now. The state average is 38 years old, so we're well above the average, and since COVID, we've grown three years older. So we were 48, now we're 51. But the biggest driver in the growth since COVID is the over 65 market. So it brings some new challenges, it brings some opportunities, but it's not slowing down. And what's happening is our numbers per household are probably dropped to 2.1 people per household. So therefore, we need a different housing mix. We've got a big retirement contingency coming in here. So it's driving land least lifestyle villages, probably about 3,000 of those types of houses on the market in some form or another at the moment. It's driving subdivisions, it's driving urban growth, and it's driving high demands in our construction and everything else. So, where are they coming from? Um, living here for 40 years, I've seen the changes. So, 1980s, very Victorian base coming up here, small business type owners. In the mid-90s, we started getting people from Sydney, predominantly western suburbs. Penriff's one of our biggest growth areas in the Harvey Bay. They were the more of the workers wanting to come up here and get a better lifestyle, sell out of Sydney, make their money, and they can get the car, the boat, the caravan, and everything else at the same price as what they were living down there. What we're seeing over the last few years is the push out of south east Queensland. So we're seeing from uh upper Gold Coast, Mortonshire, Logan area, um, and now even in the Sunshine Coast are getting pushed out of those markets due to price and the busiestness for lifestyle, so they're coming up here. Where the next stop um going up the coast? So we're getting a very much a big Southeast Queensland push in the phrase coast. We're still getting New South Wales, we still probably get about 1,700 foreign um people coming over here, we get a lot of medical coming out of overseas, we get a lot of uh South Africans in the area that are buying small businesses because you can do it in the region of Queensland. So our growth factor, uh, while we're getting a lot of retirees, we're getting a lot of auxiliary businesses that go with it. So this growth is not going to slow down. Um, it's been here since COVID, and I believe the next 20 years we're gonna have a similar tool for growth pattern. So Harvey Bay itself will probably be 100,000 plus city, and the Fraser Coast could be 160 plus thousand people in the region. So, what does that do for housing supply? It's the biggest challenge we've got here at the moment. So um COVID also blew timelines out and blew costs out. So let's talk about the shortage first. With this population about 2,700 per annum turning up into Harvey Bay, we need probably around about a thousand or twelve hundred house type mix. So that could be units, houses, retirement, villages, whatever else. But we need to be producing 1,200 new houses per annum where we've got a slow pipeline, developments takes twice as long as it used to. You know, council backed up with hundreds of development applications, builders where they might have taken 16 to 20 weeks or taking 28 to 40 weeks to build something. Um, land subdivisions are taking 18 months or more to get developed. And if you look at the life cycle of land subdivision by the time they buy the land, to it could be two and a half years, three years before somebody moves into a house. So this shortage is not catching up yet. Council's talking about a new town planning scheme and moving the boundaries out, so but I still think it's going to be 2030 or 2032 before we actually catch up with the land supply and actually start getting a more stable type thing. But if the population doesn't slow down, then that land supply issue is going to keep going up. And the costings, the the course of the shortage, because of the um cost to buy raw land now, and of course the cost to develop, um, you know, we're we've gone up significant amounts. You know, two or three years ago, you probably got land for $195,000 in Harvey Bay, you'll be $350,000 now for the same sort of land. Where somebody might bought a raw land for $15,000 to $20,000 a block, raw land, that that same raw land block is about $50,000 a block now. So everything goes up through the chain. The civil construction costs are probably 30% more or whatever else. So that leads into construction costs. We've got a land shortage, so the builders are actually waiting constantly to actually get titled land. So it's improving slightly, but I still think we're probably a year behind before land catches up to where the builders need to keep a momentum going. Early in COVID, probably most of the builders around the region were building houses for twelve hundred dollars a square meter. That same house cost would be $2,300 to $2,400 a square meter now in the current market. So that's a significant jump for any buyer trying to get into the housing market. So you put your land up from $200 to $350 and you put your house cost up another 60% plus. Where you could get a nice house rate package of $500,550 four years ago, it's now $750,000 plus. So that's causing its own issues, it's causing affordability issues because the wages obviously don't go up in the same pace. It's stopping younger people coming into the market because they can't get the foothold in here. Um and it's keeping our land supply tight because our vacancy rates are very low. Uh, we're not bringing enough rental properties, and we haven't changed things yet. So construction costs, I think, are steadied off a bit, but we've got a current worldwide crisis with fuel. So we've already seen the last two weeks there's an excise coming on any sort of deliveries. We're seeing it from 10% to 30% excise when gravel's getting supplied, or you know, your trucks are got to transport uh materials up from Brisbane. It's going to cause another problem with the housing industry over the next few months. So the commercial market. Harvey Bay's always had a reasonably strong commercial market. Um health's our number one employer. We have about 21.3% of our population actually work in the health industry, whether it's NDIS, straight medical doctors, hospital, whatever else. That's mainly due to the age of our population and need for help. The problem with that is 30% of that industry is probably going to be retired in the next two years, or sorry, ten years. So as they retire, we're not getting replacement through. So we need we need more people in that industry to grow. So we're getting the bricks and mortar on the ground, we're seeing more medical centres open up, we're seeing you know, X-ray clinics, pathology, all those things starting to grow. Um our hospitals are growing, but we don't have the staff to grow with it. Probably one of the main sectors that is growing at the moment is industrial. Because the commercial property market is going so well, and because you need a lot of supply from building materials to um you know mechanics to all those things added with every every thousand, two thousand population. Industrial seems to be the number one sector that's really taking off. It's the small sectors, not the big manufacturers. We're not we're not on a highway, we're not on a railway loop, or we're not on a shipping port. So therefore, our industrial is all very much localized. It's all about what we're doing on the ground. We don't export things here. So we're seeing 100, 200 square meter sheds everywhere, um, and that seems to be the bulk of the growth in there. Office space seems to be slowing. I think COVID's turned that upside down a little bit with working from home and shared offices and different things. So that sector's okay. Retail, we've had another big boost in retail probably over the last two years. We've seen a lot of you know new spotlights, anacondas, um, massive bunnings, a lot of a lot of new big box retailers, AMARTs, all coming into town. That's a really good sign for our futures because they do all their research, and if they don't see long-term growth and they don't see long-term prosperity, those guys don't come into our market. So they're a real signal. When they turn up, you know you're at the next level, which is happening. So our infrastructure is the thing that's not catching up. Um, our roads, our roads are so far behind. Main roads haven't done major intersections, they haven't done the lights and pale barumheads road, they haven't done the roundabout and Braille Road, they haven't done enough lanes going between Harvey Bay and Merriba. Main roads are seriously underfunded and seriously years behind. Um so I don't know how they're going to catch up. There's always pressure going on them, but they don't seem to be ever catching up, and they're splitting a budget across a whole state that's just not adequate for the growth of our city. And the problem with government departments is they use census information, and that census information is four or five years old, so they're not really seeing the current trends of what's happening. So by the time the next census comes out, they'll go, uh-oh, we're so many years behind, we need to speed up again. And this happens every cycle. Airport's going really well, it's probably the best uh flight numbers in our airport, you know, thanks to the Fraser Coast Council. Um, they've got direct flights to Melbourne, direct flights to Sydney, and constant flights in between Brisbane and Harvey Bay. So that's a great bit of infrastructure. Um sewage, we've got plenty of sewage pumping stations for our growth. Water is our next security thing there. So they're talking about a $60 million upgrade in Meribor between Teddington Dam and Langfall's Dam to give us water security long term. I think that's in with state government, but it's underway. So infrastructure is behind, but we're aware of it, and there's a new town planning scheme coming out soon, so um hopefully they start catching up as well. So, what does this mean for our future? Um, you know, we are in a major corridor, a growth corridor for the next 10 or 20 years. We're a lifestyle corridor. We've been a retiree corridor because they want to get out of the rat race, they want to come up here. Sometimes they want to shut the gate behind them and saying this is exactly how I want Harvey Bay. If I had said that in 1981 when I turned up, there'd still be about 7,000 people here. So, you know, we've got to keep growing. The town depends on it, um, the jobs depend on it, because most of our growth in our jobs is based on the population growth because our construction industry, our retail industry, even our health industry all keeps going with the growth. So we will have a property cycle, it comes and goes. I think because we're so far behind in basically all of South East Queensland, we've got Olympics coming in um 2032. We are we are chewing up so much of resources in Southeast Queensland that we will be struggling to catch up for the next four or five years. So I can't see how we go through another low cycle for a while. You know, the only thing that's really gonna cause it is, you know, these prolonged wars overseas, and if you start stopping supply coming in the region, which will cause the ripple effect and going through. The banks um are slowing, slowing, trying to slow the market through interest rate rise. They did one recently, and it's probably going to be one very soon again. Um, but it's not slowing it. And if anybody's been in this market for a very long time, you know, having six or eight percent interest is not high. In the 1980s, interest rates got up to about 22 percent. Um pre-GFC to you know eight, ten percent around that figure. So even if it does go up half percent, it's not a major jump. It's still low interest rates in the context of the history of the market. So I don't think it's the biggest factor, and I don't think it's um gotta slow the market down, it's gonna cause a lot of pain, but I think they're doing it the wrong way. The pain's really in the fuel costs and the groceries and everything like that. So, you know, those interest rates are not gonna bring them down. So, in closing, our our market is extremely strong, it's insulated based on a lifestyle change. It's it's a you know, we're going into the biggest baby boomer sector in the cycle over the next five to ten years, so I don't think that's gonna slow. They all want to get out of the cities, they don't want the rat race. Um, they want a coastal town. We're one of many, and we're the next cab off the rank after the Sunshine Coast. So the trends are gonna keep going. It's the nuances within the trends we've got to look at. You know, we've got to look at how we change our housing style. You know, we're we're being very traditional, six, eight hundred square meter block, big three-bedroom, double garages, media rooms, all those things. But we've got an older population, we've got less, you know, a lot of people, two or less people in a household, they don't want the four-bedroom house. They want an apartment, they want to live in a duplex, they want to live in a terrace house, they want to live in somewhere that's gated secure, they want to live within 500 metres walking distance of amenities. They don't want to keep getting the urban sprawl out the back of Nickenbar or the back of Dundarren and have to drive everywhere. So we've got to cater for that retiree that's alone or just a couple and move them into places. The other thing we've really got to cater for is the young people. This is this is our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity. We need to create housing styles that want to make young people move up here and they want to live near the Esperade, they want some nightlife, they want restaurants, they want things to do on the weekend, they they want fun things, they want concerts, they want good bars, they you know, they want gyms, they want all the lifestyle things, they want to walk to them. So that's another thing that we've got to change, and that's what council's trying to address at the moment with gentle density. I will do a full topic on the new town planning scheme and the gentle density hazard coming through. Um, that will be very soon, but our market's strong, our market's got growth, but there's a lot of things within this that we need to talk about over the coming weeks. So we'll break it up section by section and have a chat. So the next episode, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into the commercial property market. I'm gonna bring Maggie Brennan on. We've got to have a chat. Um, she can talk about the types of tenants moving up here, the types of buildings, the rates, how they're going up. So let's talk about the trends within leasing, the demands, see where we're heading in that. So, once again, thanks for listening to FraserCoes property brief. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow us on the podcast. And if you're interested in future projects, stay tuned because we'll bring something out every week. Thank you very much.