ONE of the most crucial pieces of infrastructure ever built on the Gold Coast, the extension of the Coolangatta airport runway, will be finished tomorrow, opening up a new era in Queensland aviation and tourism. Gold Coast Airport is actively wooing international airlines as it tries to increase passenger visitor numbers after a record 12 months.The Gold Coast Airport could only push ahead with the runway extension once the delayed Tugun bypass project started, because the bypass tunnel and a future Robina-Gold Coast Airport rail line would run underneath a section of the runway. It complements a master plan that will ultimately turn the airport into one of the busiest in the country. The completed runway will measure 2500m.
Source: The Bulletin
- Rental prices are rising up to twice as fast as inflation
- Australia one of the least affordable housing markets
RENTAL prices have been rising at more than twice the pace of inflation, a housing affordability report to be released today shows.
The report shows Australians are paying $44 a week more in real terms for a three-bedroom house than they were in June, 2001.
Research conducted by report authors, Australians for Affordable Housing, shows the national median rent for a three-bedroom house would have been $232 in the last quarter if rents had only risen with CPI. However, the national median rent for December 2006 was $276.
“For renters, decent accommodation is difficult to find,” Australians for Affordable Housing spokesman David Imber said yesterday.
“People looking to rent are being forced into auction situations, where the highest bidder wins.”
Source: The Adelaide Advertiser
Queensland’s $11.6 billion Spending for 2007 – the largest building program in the nation.
Summary:
- The population of Queensland grows by 1500 people every week – 1000 in South-East Queensland alone.
- In December 2005, Queensland’s population topped 4 million people.
- The state’s population is projected to grow by a further 1.54 million people over the next two decades.
- By then, Queensland is predicted to overtake Victoria as the second most populous state in the country.
- For more than a decade, Queensland’s economy has grown faster than the national average.
- Infrastructure and business investment are at record high levels.
- Queensland’s construction workforce grew by 44 800 in the last two years, driven by the state’s strong economy and rapidly growing need for housing, services and infrastructure.
- Overseas exports grew 34% in 2005/06 to reach a record $35.4 billion.
Source: www.infrastructure.qld.gov.au
Houses are selling within days of being listed in what real estate experts say is a sure sign of a comeback in the property market. A Sunday Mail investigation found houses in suburbs from Ipswich to Kallangur, just north of Brisbane, are being snapped up in less than 48 hours.
PRDnationwide national research director Tim Lawless said it was part of a new awakening and he believed the Brisbane-area market would head towards double-digit growth by next year.
“By then there’ll be a lot more investors in the marketplace and we are going to see the demand start to lift and the time on the market start to fall even further,” he said.
Carolans Nambour First National Real Estate spokesman Craig Heppell said “Any properties priced to market, between $300,000 and $350,000 don’t last long.”Active Property Sales agent Susan Bardon has achieved record sales in December, January, February and March.
“Last weekend, I listed a house and sold it on the same day, in about six hours,” she said.
Real Estate Institute of Queensland chairman Peter McGrath said auction clearance rates were now 50 per cent or higher.”Brisbane is leading the way at the moment,” he said.
“The market is certainly very healthy, particularly in affordable areas, without a shadow of a doubt.”
He said migration into southeast Queensland and rising rents were fuelling demand.
Debora Sutton from Remax Home Centre in Brisbane’s Windsor said houses sold as quickly as she could get potential buyers in for a look.”Phone lines go crazy as soon as a new listing goes out — I’m selling houses within a couple of hours.”
Source: Sunday Mail
Gold Coast’s population is catching up! The number of people moving to the Gold Coast is set to outstrip Brisbane for the first time in a decade.
Analyst Michael Matusik believes the Gold Coast may have even topped Brisbane already , showing the largest increase in population of any local government area in Australia. He attributed the growth (484,005 to 497,5687 in 2005/2006) to a general desire of people wanting to live near the beach, coupled with more land being released on the Gold Coast than Brisbane.
Brisbane has already experienced more than half of last year’s 7 per cent price growth in the past two months, and auction clearance rates were 58 per cent last month – the highest since September 2003.
There has also been a record increase in the number of Australians planning to buy a residential investment property in the next year. The number is up 35 per cent from the September 2006 quarter to 779,000 in the December 2006 quarter, research by Wizard Home Loans has revealed.
“The market across Queensland is strong… we are seeing activity that would normally take twice as long happen in a few months,” property researcher Michael Matusik said.
Place Estate Agents co-principal Tim Douglas said there was nothing looming that could derail the strong trend. “Demand for inner-city is just getting greater and greater. Rental demand is very strong too,” he said.
“From what I have found, things start in the inner-city and ripple to the outer suburbs.” Mr Douglas said there was a worryingly low supply across the board for homes and units for sale in Brisbane.
Homes in the $300,000 to $450,000 bracket have jumped about $50,000 in value and a similar 12 per cent leap has occurred across the board since late last year.
“I listed a property in Red Hill. The owner said he was happy to get $360,000 and we sold it for $445,000 – there were six offers on it,” Mr Douglas said.
Queensland led the country in the best February ever for mortgage sales, according to the latest figures out this week from Australia’s largest mortgage broker, AFG.
Source: Courier Mail
Coast units boom leaves Brisbane in the shade. The Gold Coast has been crowned Queensland’s unit capital with builders barely able to keep pace with buyers and prices as high as the high rises. The REIQ figures show unit and townhouse prices have jumped almost 100 percent since 2001, yet the city continues to record strong growth with a price increase of 3.3% in the past quarter alone , outstripping Brisbane’s 1.3%.
Source: Weekend Bulletin
IF YOU think the Gold Coast has too many high-rise buildings, the 20-year projections of urban planning experts suggest the skyscrapers have only just begun.There would not be just one 80-storey Q1 building, the world’s tallest residential tower, but many more even taller structures casting their afternoon shadows across Surfers Paradise beach.
The bulging Gold Coast would have finally delivered on the threat of giving southeast Queensland a Los Angeles-style skyline.To the west, the new regional centres of Robina and Coomera would be not just home to sprawling shopping malls, but 13-storey office blocks.And in the western suburban area, way beyond the city’s boundaries in north Beaudesert, an average Joe would struggle to put together a deposit on a three-bedroom brick veneer home.
This futurist picture of the Gold Coast is being painted by the Urban Development Institute of Australia, based on current planning guidelines and population projections. Those guidelines – the South-East Queensland Regional Plan, the Gold Coast City Council strategic plan and Broadhectare study – lead urban development institute Gold Coast and Tweed branch president Kerrie Young to predict the Coast will run out of residential land in a little more than a decade.
The city’s population of 500,000 is expected to blow out to more than 830,000 by 2026, so higher-density living and higher buildings are the only way to accommodate the new arrivals.
Demographer Bernard Salt picks up on the bigger picture, the cultural change from this planning phenomenon which, he argues, the community will need to debate.”It will lead to the Sydneyfication of the Gold Coast. This was Sydney in the late 1990s,” Mr Salt said, when told of the UDIA’s predictions last week.”It closed down the developable residential land on the edge of Sydney. In early 2000, in the boom, it was like putting a lid on a steaming kettle. Prices skyrocketed.”
Source: Sunday Mail
It’s the return of the gold rush. Gold Coast property prospectors are again set to strike it rich as the latest Midwood report shows a buying boom will hit next year. Author and anaylst Bill Morris said property prices could rise as much as 40% fuelled by population growth and a thriving state economy.
The Midwood Report for the Feb 2007 quarter shows that the Queensland economy is outpacing the country, with the states gross domestic product increasing by 4.75% compared to Australia’s 2.6%.
Population growth is also increasing steadily, at a healthy 2% for the state with the coast counting 530,200 residents last month.
“The basic story from this report is all good news for Queensland and therefore the Gold Coast” he said. “From housing to units to rental prices, everything is on the way up.The future has literally never looked brighter”.
Source: Gold Coast Bulletin
The number of people planning to buy property this year has jumped by a third compared to the number wanting to do so last year, a Nielsen survey has found. And this was before the stockmarket reversal that knocked 4 per cent off share prices last week.
Clearly, many investors are planning to switch money from the stockmarket to pay for their property plans.
It is this underlying nervousness among the mums and dads that will now accelerate the flow of money into property. And don’t the real estate agents know it. There is a shortage of rental property and rental yields have just had their biggest rise in 16 years.
Source: The Age
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