Brisbane’s housing market is relatively under-researched, despite the value that can be gained from examining a residential property market operating in an environment of significant population growth through high inward interstate migration, and sustained urban building and development activity. The latter includes a rapid expansion in inner city apartment construction and concurrent ongoing major urban expansion at the urban fringe. Within this environment, issues of private rental housing supply, gentrification and affordability for renters are constant social policy factors requiring consideration.

The latest trends in private rental supply at the lower cost end in Brisbane suggest that previously identified tendencies towards loss of very low cost stock have continued into the start of the twenty-first century across the Brisbane metropolitan area as a whole. There has been a small increase in the supply of rental housing in the more broadly defined’ lower cost quarter’ of the market in Brisbane (very low and low-moderate stock combined) in absolute terms, although weighed against the significant growth which has taken place in the rental market overall, there has still been relative decline in this segment.

Important spatial distinctions in supply within the Brisbane metropolitan area are evident, and there has been a clear drift away from the very low and lower cost end of the market in the inner city, towards greater supply in outer urban locations of the metropolis. There are also temporal considerations, and differences appear to exist between the periods immediately prior to, and after turn of the new century.

This analysis does not attempt to resolve whether lower income households have directly benefited or suffered from changes in the supply of lower cost housing, nor does it seek to identify whether there has been any change to housing affordability in the rental sector. Nevertheless, the findings of this research potentially have significant policy and research implications. The de facto policy reliance on the private rented sector to house lower income households needs to be evaluated in the context of supply and other trends.

A number of possible explanations for these changes in supply exist, ranging from structural and systemic processes related to rental housing provision (in particular rental investor activity), recent government policy initiatives, and broader social phenomena. In practice, it is likely that a combination of all of these factors have brought about these most recent supply trends. The need to better understand the operations of the private rental market, and the behaviour of investors, tenants and other agents, remains, and ongoing monitoring of the sector using a variety of data sources and methodologies is crucial to achieving such an understanding.