Ask a rental agent in Logan, Ipswich or the outer Gold Coast what a single advertised property attracts these days, and the answer is not one or two applications — it is often forty or fifty, arriving within days of the listing going live. A family that has just driven up from Sydney or Melbourne, chasing a job and a lower cost of living, finds itself competing against dozens of equally motivated applicants for a modest three-bedroom house, offering rent in advance and longer leases just to stand out. Multiply that scene across South East Queensland and the regional centres absorbing the same wave of arrivals, and it describes the daily reality behind a set of numbers that have moved further and faster than almost anywhere else in the country.
Queensland has spent the past four years as Australians' preferred destination when they move between states, and the housing system it had in 2020 — built for a slower rate of growth — has not kept pace. Two governments, one Labor and now one Liberal National, have each put housing at the centre of their agenda under the same banner. What follows is what they promised, what the evidence shows, and who is still waiting.
What both governments promised
By early 2024 the pressure had become impossible for the Miles Labor government to ignore. More than 120,000 people moved to Queensland in the year to September 2023 — roughly 88,000 from overseas and 33,000 from interstate (approx.) — adding the equivalent of a small city to the state's population in a single year (ABS/Centre for Population, Sep-2023, approx.). In March 2024, Premier Steven Miles launched Homes for Queenslanders, a 20-year strategy backed by an initial $3.1 billion, setting a target of 1 million new homes by 2046, including 53,000 social and affordable homes (Queensland Government, Homes for Queenslanders, Mar-2024, approx.). It sat alongside an earlier Labor reform already in force: from 1 July 2023, Queensland law limited rent increases on a tenancy to once every 12 months, with a loophole that let landlords reset the clock by changing tenants closed by a further amendment from 6 June 2024 (Residential Tenancies Authority, rental law changes, 2023–2024).
The Crisafulli LNP government, elected in October 2024, kept the Homes for Queenslanders name and much of its architecture, while sharpening the timeline: the target became 1 million homes and 53,500 social and community homes by 2044 — two years earlier than Labor's date — backed by a claimed $5.6 billion social and community housing investment (approx.) (Queensland Government, Ministerial Statements, 2025, approx.). The new government added its own measures: abolishing stamp duty for first home buyers on new homes, lifting the stamp duty concession threshold on existing homes to $700,000, a shared-equity scheme aimed at closing the deposit gap, a $2 billion housing infrastructure fund, and a program unlocking under-used church and charity land for social housing (Queensland Government, Ministerial Statements, 2024–2025, approx.). It also commissioned the Queensland Productivity Commission to examine why homes take so long to build — a report that landed in October 2025 (Queensland Productivity Commission, Final Report, Oct-2025).
The strongest case
A housing system finally being asked to keep up with a population it did not plan for
Put at its strongest, the case for both governments has real weight. Queensland did not choose to become the country's most popular interstate migration destination — that is a decision made by tens of thousands of individual households each year, drawn by warmer weather, comparatively cheaper housing and jobs in construction, mining, health and aged care. No planning system in Australia is built to absorb population growth at the pace Queensland has recorded since 2020 without a lag, and both the Miles and Crisafulli governments deserve credit for naming a specific, numeric target — 1 million homes — rather than a vague aspiration, and for being willing to be measured against it in public.
The Crisafulli government's decision to keep Labor's plan running, rather than scrap it and start again, also deserves acknowledgement: continuity in a 20-year housing strategy matters more than the political credit of a rebrand, and shortening the delivery timeline by two years, whatever the motive, is a harder target to hit, not an easier one. Commissioning the Productivity Commission to examine construction-sector bottlenecks, rather than assuming more funding alone would fix a supply problem, is the kind of unglamorous, evidence-seeking step a government serious about the problem tends to take. And Labor's rent-increase-frequency cap, which the LNP has kept in force, is a genuine, low-cost renter protection that did not exist before mid-2023.
The evidence
The clearest single measure of the squeeze is the rental vacancy rate — the share of rental properties sitting empty and available at any given time. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ) classifies a healthy, balanced market as one with a vacancy rate between 2.6 and 3.5 per cent. Brisbane has not been near that band since before the pandemic. The city hit a record low of around 0.6 per cent in early 2023, and REIQ's December 2025 quarter report put the statewide rate at 1.0 per cent, with Greater Brisbane also at 1.0 per cent and some inner-city and lifestyle markets sitting well below that (REIQ, Residential Vacancy Rate Report, Dec-2025 qtr, approx.). A market this tight hands almost all negotiating power to landlords and agents, which is precisely what tenants describe when a single listing draws dozens of applications.
Tight vacancy has fed directly into price. CoreLogic/Cotality recorded Brisbane rents rising by roughly 8 to 9 per cent over the year to late 2024 (approx., secondary source) — the continuation of consecutive annual increases since the pandemic began — while Brisbane's median house value climbed to somewhere around $930,000 to $950,000 by mid-2024 and kept rising through 2025 (CoreLogic/Cotality Home Value Index, approx.). REIQ's own figures put the statewide median house price at roughly $810,000 in the March 2025 quarter, up around 11 per cent over the year (REIQ, approx.), with Queensland recording some of the fastest annual price growth of any state as buyers priced out of Sydney and Melbourne redirected their budgets north.
Who is still waiting
Behind the market figures sits a slower-moving, more visible failure: the queue for a home Queenslanders cannot afford in the private market at all. The state's Social Housing Register — the official waitlist administered by the Department of Housing, Local Government, Planning and Public Works — carried somewhere on the order of 45,000 households or more through 2025 (approx.), most assessed as being in "very high" or "high" need, meaning they are homeless, at risk of homelessness, or living in housing that is unsafe or unsuitable (Queensland Social Housing Register, Dept of Housing, 2025, approx.). Wait times for a two-bedroom social housing property in parts of South East Queensland routinely run past two years.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's most recent Specialist Homelessness Services report shows Queensland's crisis and transitional accommodation services supported roughly 54,700 clients in 2024–25, the third-highest number of any state (AIHW, Specialist Homelessness Services Annual Report 2024–25). More troubling than the level is the trend: the number of Queenslanders experiencing persistent, long-term homelessness — repeatedly returning to homelessness services over time — more than doubled between 2018–19 and 2024–25, from around 4,200 to close to 9,900 (AIHW, Specialist Homelessness Services Annual Report 2024–25, approx.). That is not a market correcting itself; it is a hard core of need that has grown every year, regardless of which party has held government.
The number of Queenslanders trapped in persistent homelessness has more than doubled in six years — a trend that did not start, and has not stopped, under either government.
The critique
Separate what each government caused from what it inherited, and the honest picture is mixed for both. Neither the Miles Labor government nor the Crisafulli LNP government created Queensland's appeal to interstate movers — that reflects decades of climate, lifestyle and relative-affordability advantages over Sydney and Melbourne, reinforced by remote work becoming normal after the pandemic. Blaming either government for the volume of people wanting to live in Queensland misreads the problem. What both governments are responsible for is whether the state's planning and construction system was made ready for that demand quickly enough — and on the evidence, it was not.
Labor's Homes for Queenslanders arrived late relative to the crisis it was designed to fix. Vacancy rates had already been below 1 per cent for the best part of two years, and rents had already risen sharply, by the time the plan was unveiled in March 2024 — a government responding to conditions its own agencies' data had shown since at least 2021 and 2022. The plan's headline target, 1 million homes by 2046, was also a 22-year horizon that offered no near-term relief to anyone currently searching for a rental, and its social housing component — 53,000 homes — amounted to close to the size of the waitlist that already existed before a single one of those homes had been built, let alone the households who would join the queue in the years it takes to deliver them.
The Crisafulli government's record after its first full year in office shows a similar gap between target and delivery. The Queensland Productivity Commission's own October 2025 inquiry found that fragmented planning rules across the state's 77 local government areas were adding cost and delay to every project — a structural problem stamp-duty concessions and an infrastructure fund do not, by themselves, fix (Queensland Productivity Commission, Final Report, Oct-2025). Independent tracking of the National Housing Accord — the national building agreement Queensland signed alongside the Commonwealth and every other state — found Queensland running roughly 31 per cent behind the pace its own commitments require, one of the two worst-performing states in the country alongside New South Wales (National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, State of the Housing System, 2025, approx.). Population growth alone, based on roughly 112,000 additional Queenslanders in the year to September 2024, implies a need for something on the order of 45,000 new dwellings a year at typical occupancy rates — a bar the state's building approvals have not cleared (ABS Building Activity; NHSAC, approx.).
The demand-side measures both governments have leaned on carry a familiar risk. Cutting stamp duty for first home buyers and expanding shared-equity access make it easier for an eligible buyer to compete for an existing home, but neither adds a single dwelling to a market where the number of available homes is the binding constraint. Absent a matching acceleration in approvals and completions, extra purchasing power directed at a largely fixed stock of housing tends to show up in price rather than in access — the same dynamic this site's federal housing coverage documents at the national level.
The risk to the future
A generation of Queenslanders priced out of the state they moved to build a life in
Queensland's pitch to the rest of the country for the past decade has been affordability and opportunity: a warmer, cheaper alternative to Sydney and Melbourne, with jobs to match. That pitch is now colliding with its own success. If vacancy rates stay near record lows and rents keep outpacing wages through the back half of this decade, the state risks becoming the next capital-city affordability crisis it was, until recently, the escape valve from — with the added strain of a homelessness-service system that, on the AIHW's own figures, has already absorbed a doubling caseload of persistent need for six straight years.
The most immediate risk sits with essential workers arriving for exactly the jobs the state is trying to fill — nurses, teachers, construction workers, aged-care staff — who increasingly cannot find housing within a reasonable commute of the work Queensland recruited them for. If that mismatch continues, it stops being only a housing story and becomes a service-delivery story, as the hospitals, schools and construction sites this site's other Queensland coverage examines struggle to staff themselves in the towns and suburbs where demand is highest. Both Homes for Queenslanders targets — Labor's original and the LNP's accelerated version — run to 2044 or 2046. Every year those targets slip is a year in which the gap between the state Queensland promised newcomers and the state it is currently delivering widens a little further.