The Sunshine Coast Just Topped the List Again.

This week, the latest Regional Movers Index confirmed what regular readers of this newsletter will already suspect: the Sunshine Coast has retained its position as Australia’s top regional migration destination, attracting close to nine per cent of the nation’s total net internal migration over the past year. It’s the fourth consecutive quarter the region has held the title.

If you’ve followed Sunshine Coast property for any length of time, this headline is starting to feel less like news and more like a fixture. A ranking that repeats itself every quarter stops being a story about who’s arriving and starts being a story about what a region does with the people who keep showing up.

The instinct, whenever migration numbers like this surface, is to treat migration itself as the pressure point in the housing conversation. Too many people, not enough homes. The evidence doesn’t support that framing cleanly. The undersupply the Sunshine Coast is living with predates this migration cycle by years.

The gap, in numbers

Over the past five years, the region has delivered an average of roughly 1,969 new dwellings a year, against underlying demand of around 3,600 or more. That’s a region building at little more than half the rate it needs to, year after year. The result is a structural shortfall of more than 8,000 homes accumulated over five years, enough to house upwards of 20,000 people. That squeeze shows up as overcrowding, rental pressure and people leaving the region altogether, now touching an estimated 40,000-plus.

None of that traces back to how many people relocated last quarter. It traces back to a pipeline that hasn’t kept pace since well before this migration cycle began.

Why approvals keep announcing a fix that never lands

Every time a major project gets the green light, it reads like progress. Stockland’s newly approved Aura South development at Halls Creek will eventually deliver up to 12,000 homes across more than 1,200 hectares, one of the largest single planning approvals the region has seen in years.

Approvals and completions are two different things. Around 500 already-approved dwellings sat on paper, uncommenced, in 2024/25. Construction costs reset 30-40% higher between 2020 and 2023 and haven’t fully unwound. Builder insolvencies surged roughly 70% year-on-year in 2023. Projects that once stacked up financially increasingly don’t, regardless of whether council has signed off on them.

Council costs add another layer. Sunshine Coast infrastructure charges have climbed an estimated 300-400% over the past decade, sitting well above comparable South East Queensland benchmarks. On a typical 30-lot subdivision, that now works out to roughly $1.9 million in council-related charges alone before construction even begins, with per-lot costs commonly landing in the $60,000-$75,000 range. Those costs weigh heaviest on duplexes, dual-key homes and secondary dwellings, the housing formats best placed to close the region’s missing-middle shortage.

A 12,000-home approval is real progress, but developments of this scale realistically take a decade or more to deliver in full, not a single construction season. Spread over that timeframe, it does little more than track the region’s current pace of undersupply, roughly 1,600 homes a year short of demand, rather than close it. It’s arriving into a system where the last five years of demand already outstripped delivery by 8,000-plus homes, where a third of approved stock in the pipeline can stall before a foundation is poured, and where the cost of clearing council alone can run into seven figures before a single wall goes up. Even with Aura South counted in, the shortfall keeps growing. 

The better question

The question worth asking isn’t how many people are arriving. It’s how much housing this region can actually deliver at scale, against costs and timelines moving in the wrong direction. That’s exactly why the Sunshine Coast has earned its own dedicated investigation within The Clarity Report.

The Clarity Report itself is coming together as our most comprehensive piece of research yet, and it’s close. We released the first teaser last week, with the full report landing in the coming weeks. As the research progressed, it became clear the Sunshine Coast couldn’t sit as just one section among many. The scale of migration, the cost structure working against new supply, and the delivery gap sitting underneath it are significant enough on their own to warrant a dedicated sub-report within the broader bundle. The sub-report goes further: where the shortfall is concentrated by housing type, what the true cost stack looks like project by project, and exactly how far delivery would need to accelerate to close the gap rather than simply keep pace with it.

Your Next Step

Being right about which region tops the migration ladder next quarter won’t move your portfolio forward. Understanding what that ranking actually does to supply, costs and delivery capacity will. The Sunshine Coast sub-report is part of The Clarity Report, our full investigation into what’s really driving the nation’s housing system, launching in the coming weeks.

Register your interest now to be among the first to receive it, or connect with us today to speak with a property coach about what these dynamics mean for your position ahead of its release. It’s in final production stages now.