Episode Details

While many markets suffered from the economic impact of COVID-19, Brisbane's property values remained resilient last year, and now almost all property analysts are suggesting that Brisbane's housing markets will perform strongly in 2021.

On today's show, I chat with Brett Warren, national director of Metropole Property Strategist based in Brisbane to understand what's really going on and why this time is different.

In fact, digging deeper into the statistics of property growth over the last few years, some properties have far outperformed others and freestanding Brisbane houses with 5-7 km of the CBD or in good school catchment zones have grown in value strongly.

Brisbane has really been a two-tier market and I know that many of the properties purchased for clients of Metropole's Brisbane office showed double-digit capital growth over the property last 12 months.

While Melbourne and Sydney are highly regarded as Australia's two world-class capital cities, Brisbane is what many class as a "New World City", and on today's podcast we will explain what that means and why those investors who take advantage of the changing trends in Brisbane will benefit significantly over the next few years, so welcome to today show

Some of the things we discussed

Metropole has had an office in Brisbane for almost 2 decades and in that time I've seen the city morph into a new world city.

Australia is very different from other countries with regards to the way we live. 86% of our 25 million population live in urban areas and 50% of these Australians live in either Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane.

While overall, the Brisbane property market has underperformed Melbourne and Sydney over the last decade there are different segments of the market that performed very strongly and we dig into this as we have a chat.

Australia has two global cities – Sydney and Melbourne - they are recognized around the world – Sydney for the Opera House, Melbourne for sport and art. Now Brisbane is being recognized as a "New World City."

Brisbane punches above its weight - It's only the 172nd biggest city in the world, but it's the 80th most globally connected.

It's in the top 30 percent of the world's fastest-growing cities, it's got world-class direct foreign investment, a competitive labour market, a highly lifestyle model and it's an international student city.

A New World City must also have some "globally oriented" business clusters.

In Brisbane's case, it's higher education, it's the digital economy and it's commodities and professional services of various kinds but it's also travel and tourism and conventions."

Brisbane has been building its infrastructure and economy and is now attracting population growth.

Also, Brisbane has less traffic congestion than Australia's 2 big global cities.

What is the Brisbane property market?

Let's be clear what we're talking about - many outsiders see Brisbane as stretching from the Sunshine Coast in the north to the New South Wales border in the south, 200 km long.

In one sense they are right because the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast are now closely interconnected with Brisbane and workers will commute from these locations on their jobs in Brisbane.

In fact, that's one of the reasons why property values have not grown as strongly over the last few decades - because SE Queensland has had abundant supply of properties, however, we're not recommending investing just anywhere in this large parcel of real estate.

We only focus on properties in prime locations within 5 to 7 km of the Brisbane CBD.

Brisbane has underperformed

Brisbane's capital growth has been from the top down.

There has been strong capital growth in the sought after, more affluent, more established inner suburbs within 5 to 7 km of Brisbane, but there has been