Australia’s housing pressures are not confined to the largest capitals. The Gold Coast has recently drawn attention for having some of the highest advertised house rents in Australia.
As migration flows reshape where people live and work, rapidly growing regional centres like the Gold Coast are becoming increasingly important drivers of national housing demand.
While headline rankings can sometimes be misleading when comparing different housing markets, the underlying data tell an interesting and structurally significant story.
Rather than simply being a lifestyle rich coastal market experiencing a surge in rent prices, the Gold Coast is emerging as one of the most expensive and fastest growing rental markets in the country.
Rapid population growth combined with housing supply that has struggled to keep pace helps to explain the low vacancy (1.19%, Feb 2026) and the near doubling in house and unit rents seen in the past 5 years.
Population data from the ABS show that the Gold Coast has added more than 68,000 residents since 2019, taking the regional city’s population to just under 700,000 as of June 30, 2024.
At current growth rates, the Gold Coast likely surpassed the 700,000 milestone during 2025 and could approach 730,000 residents by mid-2026.
That makes it comfortably the largest non capital city urban region in Australia, larger than many other regional centres such as Newcastle, Geelong or the Sunshine Coast.
The Gold Coast has seen its population surge in recent years. Picture: Getty
This growth is striking not just because of the number of people arriving, but because of the pace of expansion for a city already of significant scale. Since before the pandemic, the Gold Coast population has grown by around 11%, a rate roughly 4 times faster than Sydney’s population growth over the same period. For a housing market already approaching metropolitan scale, that has represented a large demand uplift.
Population growth of that magnitude has had significant housing implications. With the average household size in Australia sitting at roughly 2.5 people per dwelling, the Gold Coast’s population increase implies demand for around 27,000 additional homes over the 5 years to June 2024, simply to keep housing availability stable.
When population growth occurs faster than the housing stock expands, home prices tend to rise and vacancy rates tighten while rents lift.
Data on residential building approvals provide insight into how housing supply has responded. Approvals are the best case scenario of how many homes are eventually built and added to the dwelling stock, so we adjust approvals for attrition and dwelling demolitions approved.
Approvals typically translate into completed homes over the following 1 to 3 years depending on dwelling type. Detached houses typically take a year from approval to completion, and apartment projects closer to 2.5 years. As a result, approvals from previous years are only now translating into new supply entering the market.
REA Group senior economist, Eleanor Creagh. Picture: Supplied
The data suggest that since June 2019, the Gold Coast has under delivered housing by around 3,400 dwellings relative to population growth to mid-2024, under the assumption of 2.5 people per dwelling.
Extrapolating this forward and assuming population growth continues at the 2023–24 pace while the approvals pipeline progresses under current lag and attrition assumptions, sees that shortfall not only persist but accelerate sharply through 2025 and 2026 to a cumulative shortfall of over 8000 dwellings.
If the average household size was less the gap between implied dwelling demand and estimated net delivered supply since June 2019 (cumulative housing shortfall) would be even larger.
The cumulative gap is measured relative to June 2019 and therefore reflects the change in housing balance since that point, measuring how much conditions have tightened over the period.
So even though the Gold Coast has been building at a relatively solid pace, around 7 dwellings per 1,000 residents each year, that hasn’t been enough to keep up with population growth.
Further we saw a sharp drop off in building activity on the Gold Coast, from around 9 homes per 1,000 residents in 2020 to closer to 6 by 2022. That downshift in supply came just as population growth surged, which is why we’re now seeing a large housing shortfall emerge.
The modelling suggests the housing shortfall on the Gold Coast isn’t just likely to have persisted but has probably become worse. Even if population growth was much lower than the 2023–24 pace extrapolated forward, the gap between demand and supply could have doubled by now.
Article first published here
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