Fraser Coast Property Market In Stats (April 2026)

In this solo episode of the Fraser Coast Property Brief, Glen Winney breaks down the latest property market data and what it means for the region right now.

The key message is clear. Demand is strong. Supply is not keeping up.

With median house prices now sitting at $735,000 and up 12.7% over the past 12 months, the Fraser Coast is not slowing down. At the same time, rental vacancy rates remain tight across Hervey Bay and Maryborough, placing continued pressure on affordability and availability.

This episode explores what is driving the market, from rapid population growth and shifting demographics to economic activity and housing delivery challenges. It also looks ahead at what needs to happen next to support sustainable growth across the region.

In this episode, you will learn:

•  What the latest property data is telling us 
•  Why supply is now the biggest issue in the market 
•  How population growth has changed the region post-COVID 
•  What tight rental conditions mean for investors and tenants 
•  Where future housing supply will need to come from 
•  Why approvals alone are not enough to solve the problem 

If you are a buyer, investor, developer, or simply interested in where the Fraser Coast is heading, this episode gives you a clear, data-backed view of the market.

Watch on YouTube to see the full charts and visuals behind the numbers.

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. Each episode brings you insights into local projects, market trends, and the people helping shape the future of our region. Welcome to the latest version of the Fraser Coast Property Brief. Today it's going to be all about stats. I'm doing this one by myself. Anyone that knows me loves I love my stats around the Harvey Bay and the Fraser Coast region. So if you're listening to this on the podcast, also check it out on YouTube because I'm actually using a screen this time and I'm showing a lot of graphs and a lot of statistical information on what's going on in the market. So if you want to follow it up, go on to YouTube and you'll see it. But today, what I'm going to do is run through what's going on in the housing market, what the problems are, and the stats will sort of like show where the real issues are. So to me, the biggest issue, the biggest issue, and the risk in the housing market is not the falling demand, it's not the war, it's not anything else, it's the inability to supply homes in this area, and we cannot build them fast enough. So if you look over the last 12 months, our medium house price is now $735,000 per house. We have risen 12.7% in the last 12 months. It's going to keep going up at similar rates in the next 12 months as well. So housing affordability is becoming an issue, but we are certainly still growing as a market. Start looking at the rental markets locally, and it's very hard to see that on the graph, but Fraser Coast only has a 1.3% vacancy rate in the rental market. Harvey Bay is approximately 1.2. Maribor is tighter than everywhere else, it's 0.9% vacancy rate. And if you look at it in context, um 2.6 to 3.5 is probably a good vacancy rate in a market. So what it's really showing is our rental market is very tight, and we do not have enough product on the ground to actually deal with the situation at the moment. Next one, our population, 120,000 for the whole of Fraser Coasts. Harvey Bay, I believe, is probably 65,000, 68,000 out of that. So Harvey Bay alone is about 54% of the population just in our area, and this is the major growth portion of the Fraser Coast. And I'll go through some of our statistics going forward. But if you look at it, we're growing about 2,700 people per annum. We do have some issues as well. We are a lower income-based population, and we're an older population, so we're only about $1,114 a week as an average wage. You know, Queensland's probably about $1,600.37 a week. Um we have less mortgages than the average in Queensland. We only have uh $300 a week repayments. Queensland's about $399. That's because we've got a lot of older people moving here, and that's because they're you know coming here debt-free as a retiree. The other big influencer is our age. We are 51 years old as an average. Queensland is 38 years old as an average, so is Australia. So we're well above national and state averages on our population. That is a good thing, but it also creates issues as we go through, which I'll go through. Um education. We are lower on education, we're 11% university qualified. You look at Queensland, we're it's about 22%. You look at Australia, it's about 26%. So we're fairly low educated as a region, um, but we're higher than average on trade. So we've got a lot of trade-qualified people in the area, you know, we're 26%, Queensland's 22%, Australia's 19%. So, you know, we are very trade-based, and that reflects in our job market, and the building industry constitutes about 10% of the actual employment in the area. Unemployment is 8.5%, Queensland's 5.4%, Australia's 5.1%. While 8.5% may sound high now, for many a decade we were sitting in the you know mid-teens. We were in 14-15%, and youth unemployment used to be over 20% for a long time in Harvey Bay. So since COVID, our unemployment rates come down quite a lot. Um, we also have a lower participation rate, again, because of retirees. We've got 45-44% that actually go into the workforce. Uh we're at Queensland 62%. So, yeah, all these statistics make a very different mix for our for our population and for our demographics here. So, um what I call the COVID effect is we are now got 120,000 population. Our population has really increased since COVID. We've grown over 2,600 people per annum, which is over 2.3%. The previous 10 years before COVID, we're running at about 1.3% growth rate. So we've just about, you know, nearly double that. Um, so it's got to keep going. If you look at all the future statistics, we're still looking at 2,500 plus per annum. We're looking at another 20,000 people here, um, or you know, just in the next 10 years or so, and we're probably, you know, Harvey Bay in the next 20 plus years could be a hundred thousand population, just Harvey Bay alone. And Fraser Coast could be 150,000, 160,000 people. So population is keep growing. What we've got to do is change who's coming here or attract some younger people here as well. Just a quick one on our economic statistics. We're about a 6.16 billion dollar turnover in the region in our economy. We have 44,000 local jobs, we have 6,726 local businesses. That tells you we have a lot of small businesses, mum and dads, one and two, you know, three employees. We don't have a lot of mega businesses here, we don't have a lot of big factories employing hundreds of people. So we are really reliant on the small businesses in our largest sector. By a long shot, is health due to our aging population. Our building approvals, um the 25-26 year, we had over $500 million worth of approvals. Um we have major pipeline. I think we've got about 350 DAs in council at the moment. Construction peaked around 2324 at about $1.1 billion. Um, we are very much driven by residential demand and the growth population, people moving here rather than manufacturing type development. Um, and construction is one of our top three sectors still, and it constitutes just over 10% of our workforce. So if you look at the workforce in a snapshot, um about 35,000 jobs on the Fraser Coast. We have uh job growth of 6,337 between 2018-2019 area, or since that region. Um top three sectors, health, it's over 8,000 jobs, and that's 22.7% of our total employment is just in the health sector. Construction comes in second with nearly just over 3,500 jobs, and that's 10.6% of in that sector. And retail trades, third one with 9.6. You can see then we get a smattering of agriculture, manufacturing, and wholesale trades and different things. But those three sectors alone constitute over 40% of our job market here. So health. Health is driving our job growth in the Fraser case. So, like I said, there's been over 6,300 jobs since 2018. Healthcare's you know taken about a third of that, 2,600 jobs, construction's grown by nearly a thousand jobs, education's grown by over 600, hospitality is coming in four for 470. But if you look at the graph and that that big green line on the bottom left is the health sector, it just leaves everything in pale pales, everything in significance besides the health sector, and that's because our age is over 51. That's because the biggest growth since COVID has been over 65 year olds, and we have a major dependency on health care here. So the region is growing rapidly, population 120,000 today. Like I said, we're forecasting over 150 by 2046, growing over 30,000 residents, you know, 25% increase in 20 years, strong migration. What that does is put a lot of pressure on housing. This is where we started this from, you know, to cater that. We only have about 2.1 people per household, and we we need, you know, if we've got 30,000 people coming here, we need round about 15,000 houses. We we probably need a thousand and twelve hundred housing product per annum, and we need that consistently for the next 20 years or so. Young people, this is the one that concerns me the most. This one's concerned me for several years, is young people leaving and retirees arriving. Um, it's not the ones going to school, it's when they get to 19 to 24 range, they want to go. They want to go see the world, they want to go get a career, they want to go to university. You can't blame them. Um, but we're not getting big numbers coming back in the 24 to 30-year-olds. And if you look at the uh 40 to 50-year-olds, we've got pretty low numbers coming back. Then the numbers start spiking over 55, 65 plus is our biggest range, and you know, even 70 plus. So, what it shows is we've got a very strong net migration of retirees and older residents, largest sector is 60 to 75-year-old group, loss of our 20 to 24-year-olds, um, many young people moving away. Um, but we're trying to get the young families back. This is our this is our issue. It's more than a demographic issue, it's a social issue. Um, if we've got all these retirees coming here, we get another 40,000 people, and we still get them in the same age range, then who's actually looking after them? Who's driving the buses around the the area? Who's doing the nursing? Who's doing the NDIS? Because that population here now, probably a third of our healthcare workers will be retired within 10 years. So you've got an exploding population and you've got a retiring workforce. Our focus needs to be on 25 to 40-year-olds. We need to attract them to the region, we need to give them a reason to come here, we need to make housing affordability, uh, we need to give them social things to do, we need nightlife, we need better things to do on the Esplanade, outdoor entertainment. We as a city are not focusing on this problem. With we keep saying we got retirees, so let's make it a retiree city and let's do all the things that the retiree wants to do. But that is not going to fix your future, it's going to give you a problem five to ten years down the track. Um, and I I really don't think um community leaders get it fully. There are some that really drive this, but as a whole and as a direction of a region, we are not turning around and looking at a new population type sector. We keep going down the same track and the retirees getting bigger and bigger. There's nothing wrong with that, but we've got to have people look after them and we've got to have people to service all the sectors in the workforce. So I went one too far. The next one, excuse for a second, is housing demand. So, you know, we we're requiring, you know, statistics are saying we're requiring over 860 houses per year every year. Um on the ground since COVID, we're seeing that we probably are doing between 1,000 and 1,200 housing products a year. So that's retirement villages, that's normal houses, that's units. Anything that's you know a livable is needing over a thousand. That's somewhere over 21,000 new dwellings. Um, and there's really only two sectors that we can grow. So we're actually going to grow um to to the south, which is Nickenbar. So we go from Chapel Road, we've got to go down to Burrell Road. That's one of our growth sectors down there, um, and we've got the Dunduaran corridor. So that's basically Pale Burhamheads Road going out the Craignesh. All the stuff on the left-hand side of the road is one of your growth sectors out there. So um you can see, you know, we've got to fit another 20,000, 30,000, maybe 40,000 houses here in the future in those two sectors. So we've got to fill that up pretty quick. There's a lot of constraints in those areas, which, you know, I don't think there's enough housing product in there because there's a lot of low land, there's a lot of nature reserves, it's a lot of you know, creeks and overland flows. So housing product needs to change, and we need to start doing infill. We need to, you know, turn the 1200 square meter house lot in a few streets from the beach into six units or a duplex or a triplex or something in amongst other things. But we've got to change the way we're doing housing going forward, and we've actually got to make it more appropriate for the type of people we're trying to attract. Um, even retirees, you know, like we keep building four-bedroom houses, uh, media rooms, you know, 220 square meter houses, 800 square meter blocks. We have an average of 2.1 people living per household. And there's a lot of retirees are living alone, um, or just the two of them, and we we we build a single-type product, which is not very attractive for that market, and it's also not very attractive for that young nurse coming in here that can't afford to go into a big $850,000, $900,000 house. They want to get into an apartment, they want to get in five minutes to the hospital or two minutes to the beach, you know, they want some other product, so we have to change our mentality of what we're actually providing here, and we need to start looking at what the future looks like, not what we need right now. Um, if you look at statistically, we've only got 12% medium density on the Fraser Coast. Um, the state average is about 24% medium density to low density housing, and Brisbane area is probably 26%. So, you know, we're way less than half of the medium density product mix we really should have on a state average. So there's a bright future in the Fraser Coast, it it's certainly a lot of growth, there's certainly um 20 years of demand coming into this area, you know. So we're gonna be getting two and a half thousand people, we're going to be building a thousand houses plus a year. Um, we're going to be expanding out. We need to start looking at that. But the one thing we need to really look at is the demographic we're trying to attract. So keep following me through. Every now and again, I'll I'll do my podcast around statistics, what's going on here, and just give you some of the facts. There's no fluff about it, it's actually what's happening on the ground, and everything I put up here is research facts, facts through IDENT or sensors or REIQ or sourced information. So I'm not making any of these figures up. I'm actually just sourcing it and trying to put it into a presentation where the layperson can understand what's really going on the ground. So if you're enjoying this, please follow me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook. Click the like. I'm putting something out every week. I'm interviewing somebody new all the time, and we're just talking about what's going on in the Fraser Coast in the property sector. And don't forget, if you're listening to this one on a podcast, it's worth having a look at the YouTube channel because we'll have a video of this as well. Okay, thank you very much. See you next one.