The booming property market in the southeast corner of the Sunshine State has snatched the headlines recently but regional areas – such as Gladstone, in Central Queensland – have experienced similarly impressive price rises over the past year.
The median house and land value in Gladstone in 2019/20 recorded an increase of 14 per cent on the prior year, as the appeal of regional Queensland during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a huge upward trajectory, according to Ray White Commercial’s latest Between the Lines research.
“The most improvement for Gladstone this year has come from the house and land package market, while the number of sales has seen a small decrease off quality results seen last year,” said Ray White Commercial Gladstone Director Andrew Allen.
He said the rise in the median house value was the highest since 2016 and attributed part of the rise to demand for newly constructed dwellings by locals.
“The vacant land market for the Gladstone LGA has seen much change over the last 20 years, heavily due to the expansion into new precincts and the peaks and troughs associated with the fluctuating population and large-scale industrial projects.”
Recent Real Estate Institute of Queensland data indicated the Gladstone residential vacancy rate had tightened further in the December 2020 quarter.
After peaking at 11.3 per cent in March 2016, the December 2020 rate of one per cent was the lowest since September 2012.
Mr Allen said the population of the region had remained steady at just over 63,000 over past years.
“However, we can see by the significant reduction in residential vacancy rates and upward pressure on rental prices that the population is growing and we’d expect to see this reflected in official data this year.
The Between the Lines report identified that while new supply in the Gladstone region had slowed, the Gladstone LGA still has more than 1400ha of broadacre land suitable for land subdivision, which could yield over 7500 new lots.
“While there’s a large amount of land available for future subdivision, much of Gladstone’s western growth corridor is constrained by infrastructure challenges and topography issues,” he said.
“In the future, land will be more costly to produce and until the retail price of land can surpass the cost of production, we expect little supply to be constructed. This inability to produce feasible land is likely to cause continued upward price pressure on available stock.”
