The Rise and Rise of the Gold Coast - February 2024

By Guest Blogger, Terry Ryder, founder,

hotspotting.com.au and propertyU

The Gold Coast has one of the nation’s strongest property markets and currently features in Hotspotting’s National Top 10 Best Buys report.

It has also been a stand-out in recent editions of the Price Predictor Index, which analyses trends with sales volumes. The Summer 2023-24 report gave positive classifications to most Gold Coast suburbs, with many of them ranked as rising markets – and the Gold Coast was included among the National Top 10 Municipalities in the report.

In the past, I’ve been reluctant to recommend the Gold Coast market because of its boom-bust history caused by regular bouts of oversupply of high-rise apartments.

But right now, the Gold Coast has the opposite problem, with a serious shortage of dwellings caused by the ongoing troubles in the building industry.

With shortages of tradespeople and materials, plus major cost escalations, it’s difficult to create high-rise buildings cost effectively and many big developments have been scrapped or deferred.

There’s no remedy in sight to this problem.

Right now, the Gold Coast has a number of strong factors providing upward pressure on prices and rents …

• strong population growth
• A desirable lifestyle
• A shortage of dwellings
• A major National trend of more buyers favouring attached dwellings

The Exodus to Affordable Lifestyle trend has been a driving factor in Australian real estate for the past decade and we continue to see people leaving the biggest cities and moving to lifestyle destinations.

Queensland remains the nation’s leading beneficiaries of internal migration, with the Gold Coast at the top of the destination list.

The Gold Coast provides a range of water environments, including ocean, Broadwater, lake and canal – and many homes front water or have views of water. The Hinterland region provides another option, sometimes referred to as “the green behind the gold”.

The Gold Coast region also has a range of price points, with median house prices for the various suburbs ranging from $680,000 to $2 million, while unit medians range from $525,000 to over $1 million.

One of the big drivers of the current Gold Coast boom is the national trend of more and more buyers opting for apartments over houses.

Lifestyle buyers, downsizing couples, investors and others are choosing attached dwellings for the low-maintenance, lock-up-and-leave lifestyle, for relative affordability, for high rental yields and for the views.

The dominant paradigm of real estate - that houses on land provide better capital growth than units - is being challenged.

The Gold Coast abounds with suburbs where units have outperformed houses in price growth, both in the recent past and in the long term.

In Surfers Paradise, for example, the median unit price has grown 13% in the past year while the median house price has dropped 5.4%. The long-term growth rate averages are 10.2% for units and 7.3% for houses.

The comparative affordability - median unit price $610,000 versus the median house price of $1.75 million - is a factor, while yields are also better (5.4% compared with 2.7% for houses). And in terms of “days on market”, units are typically selling in 27 days compared to 62 days for houses.

And there is also the prospect of ocean views.

The many similar examples throughout the Gold Coast market.

The other key factor for investors is vacancy rates. At various points in the past, the Gold Coast has suffered from over-supply and high vacancies, but currently there is a shortage of rental properties.

In the various postcodes covering the Gold Coast region, the vacancy rates range from 0.4% to 1.4%, with most below 1%.

So the Gold Coast presents as a good option for different cohorts, including home-buyers seeking lifestyle and investors seeking capital growth as well as solid rental yields – with short-term letting a viable option in the iconic tourist destination.

Using a local Gold Coast Buyers Agent is also a good ideal to help sort the wheat from the chaff when looking for the best suburbs and opportunities.

  To have one of the friendly Propertybuyer Buyers' Agents  to contact you:

   or

call us on 1300 655 615 today.