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The 2026 Intergenerational Report just landed. It's meant to be a 40-year look at the country's future. Housing, which is arguably the single biggest source of insecurity for an entire generation, gets a mention five times across 352 pages. That tells you almost everything you need to know before you've read a word of it.
What's replaced actual planning is a fashionable new answer to why we can't build enough homes: technology will sort it out. AI, automation, innovation. It's the kind of line that sounds like progress and costs absolutely nothing to say from a stage.
Here's our honest read. AI is probably useful for parts of the building process. It could speed up drawings, documentation, cost estimates, approvals. What it can't do is conjure the things that stop apartments getting built: serviced land, skilled trades, development finance, viable profit margins, and the infrastructure to tie it all together. Point a clever algorithm at a project that doesn't stack up financially, and all you get is a faster no.
This is why we're not expecting a sudden flood of new inner-Brisbane apartments. We've said it before and we'll keep saying it: the thing holding back the next tower was never a shortage of software. It's whether the numbers work. Approvals have actually risen lately, but completions keep falling well short of target, because getting permission and actually delivering a building are two different sports.
To be fair, there's a version of this where technology helps. Prefab and modular construction could move the needle, but only if we let them, which means changing how they're financed, insured and approved. Right now the system makes that difficult. So the promise is real. The delivery, for now, is not.
What does that mean for you? The scarcity that's been holding up the value of a good inner-city apartment is a delivery problem, and delivery problems don't get solved by a 40-year report or a shiny piece of software. So if you own a well located apartment in our patch, that scarcity isn't going anywhere soon. And if you're buying, don't sit on your hands waiting for a wave of cheap new supply, because it isn't coming in the timeframe anyone's promising.
We're not anti-technology, and we're not here to bag every government announcement for sport. But we would always rather you had the honest version than the buzzword one. If you want to know what any of this actually means for buying or holding an apartment in the inner city, minus the hype in either direction, that's the conversation we're good at. Love ya :-)
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