SOMEONE HAS TO PAY FOR THE CRANE

Take a walk through Newstead, South Brisbane or the fringes of the Valley and count the cranes. It is easy to assume new apartments simply appear, or that somewhere a government is building them. Neither is true. Almost every new tower in this city is built with private money, and it is worth understanding whose.

A new apartment building does not get finance because a council approved it. It gets finance because enough buyers commit early, often off the plan, before a single brick is laid. A good share of those early buyers are investors, and a meaningful slice of those buy through self managed super. That money is the thing that lets a project clear the bank and actually start. Without it, the approval just sits on a shelf.

What quietly changed

The recent budget nudges that money elsewhere. New borrowing inside self managed super to buy residential property is being closed off. Negative gearing is being narrowed to new builds from 2027. None of it touches people who already own an apartment, we have said before that existing owners are grandfathered, and that still holds. But it does change the sums for the next wave of investors deciding whether to commit to an off-the-plan unit. And those are exactly the buyers new apartment projects lean on to get built.

The part that sits oddly

Every level of government tells us we need more housing, and especially more apartments in the inner city, where most of the developable land actually is. Apartments are also the hardest thing to fund and the most dependent on the investor money these changes discourage. So we have ended up in a strange spot. The homes the city most wants built are the ones most reliant on the buyers it is quietly pointing towards shares, private credit and cash instead. Approving a precinct is not the same as building it. Someone still has to pay for the crane.

Why it matters here

We have just watched Brisbane's apartments become the most expensive entry point in the country, and that happened because demand ran ahead of supply. If the next few years of new supply thin out, because the money that funds it went somewhere with an easier return, that pressure does not ease. It compounds. For anyone who already owns a well located inner-city apartment, that is not necessarily bad news. For a city trying to house more people, it is a problem worth naming out loud.

To be fair about it, there is a real argument on the other side. Plenty of people think these concessions mostly helped those who were already comfortable and did little for supply anyway, and reasonable people land in different places on that. But the practical question for a buyer or owner in our patch is simpler than the politics. Will the apartments keep getting built at the pace this city needs? Right now, honestly, that is unclear.

If it's on your mind

Whether you are weighing an off-the-plan purchase or wondering what any of this means for an apartment you already own, we are happy to talk it through in plain terms. No spin, no agenda, just an honest read on how it actually affects you.