Special Report | SEQ Property Outlook – 2022 and Beyond

When you strip away all of the white noise, the really critical facts below are compelling:

• Historical analysis of market performance demonstrates that increased interest rates don’t correlate well with a negative impact on property prices;
• The pandemic has resulted in a strong positive surge in household savings creating substantial mortgage buffers for most households;
• Increased lending regulations since the GFC have substantially lowered the risk of mortgage stress; and
• The current economic circumstances have delivered substantial record-breaking employment, imminent wages growth, rapidly rising rental income, and interest rates that will remain substantially below the historical average for a sustained period of time.

If we then overlay the above onto the particular features of the SEQ property market (and the apartment market in particular) the data shows we should be further insulated to some extent from the impact of interest rate increases due to the comparative affordability with Sydney and Melbourne, rapid population growth with strong interstate migration and high levels of returning overseas migration, record infrastructure spending, increasing rental yields and severely constrained housing supply.

While no journey will ever be completely stress-free and entirely predictable – there will inevitably be some ups and downs – the data does not portray significant turbulence ahead for the SEQ residential property market in key suburbs. Specifically, those where everyone aspires to live and future density is somewhat constrained in most instances as a result of planning and barriers to entry for delivery. Indeed all indicators point to more and more people wanting to call the best parts of SEQ home.

Everyone has to live somewhere, and this is often not understood or respected enough in terms of the extraordinary amount of poorly dissected analysis that frequently leads to rampant speculation on the Australian residential property market.

It’s a pretty solid story of resilience for the next couple of years and what should indeed be a golden decade for SEQ as we build towards the 2032 Olympic Games.

To help navigate all the detail, we have prepared a special, detailed report that explains how we arrived at our conclusions above.