Briq Property

22/09/2026

BRIQONOMICS #03
YOUR SUBURB’S GETTING AN UPGRADE. DON’T ASSUME YOUR INVESTMENT IS.

A new hospital. A better road connection. A major transport upgrade.

The announcement lands and suddenly every nearby property listing is selling “future growth”.

It’s an appealing story.

But what actually changes for the property you own, or the one you’re about to buy?

Last week, we looked at new estates where the house is finished but the surrounding infrastructure is still developing.

This week, let’s examine what happens when that infrastructure arrives.

Start with the practical benefit.

Does it shorten a difficult commute? Create ongoing employment? Improve access to essential services? Make the location appealing to households who previously ruled it out?

Those changes deserve attention.

But the benefit doesn’t spread evenly across a suburb.

Consider a hypothetical new hospital precinct.

One property offers a short, straightforward trip to the staff entrance.

Another is closer on a map but requires a substantial detour.

A third sits beside an access road, where increased traffic could make living there less appealing.

Same project. Three different investment cases.

The closest property isn’t automatically the best positioned.

Then there’s the employment story.

Construction workers need somewhere to live while a project is built. The operational workforce may have different housing needs once it opens.

A temporary surge in demand doesn’t establish a permanent rental market.

And if a facility is relocating, some employees may simply drive to a different address from the homes they already occupy.

Before assuming an influx of tenants, ask how many jobs are additional, where those workers might live and what housing would suit them.

This is where infrastructure can influence a suburb’s household mix.

A better connection to employment might make the area practical for people who previously dismissed it.

But “professionals will move here” needs evidence. Watch leasing enquiries, achieved rents, vacancy and household data as the area changes.

Now consider the part that can get left out of the sales pitch.

The same road that improves access to your property might also unlock land for substantial new housing.

Your suburb becomes more convenient.

Your property gets more competition.

Both can happen together.

Before paying extra for the infrastructure story, ask:

[:] What practical benefit reaches this particular address?
[:] Are the employment opportunities additional, relocated or temporary?
[:] Which households would find the location more useful?
[:] How much competing housing could become available?
[:] Is the project funded and progressing, and can I manage delays?
[:] Does the asking price already assume the benefits have arrived?

An excellent project can still be a poor reason to overpay.

You could correctly predict that an area will improve and still buy the wrong property, at the wrong price, to benefit from it.

A suburb-wide announcement deserves a property-specific assessment.

Think property. Think deeper. Think Briq.

15/09/2026

BRIQONOMICS #02
NEW DOESN’T MEAN PROBLEM-FREE.

The house is finished.

The location might still be a work in progress.

Fresh paint, modern appliances and an untouched bathroom make a new investment property easy to like.

But before choosing the benchtops, look beyond the boundary.

Many new estates develop on the urban fringe, where land is available for large-scale subdivision. Depending on the location, that can mean buying further from established employment, hospitals, schools, shopping and public transport.

You might be buying a finished home in a suburb whose convenience is still under construction.

That matters because tenants choose more than a floor plan.

They choose the school run. The drive to work. The grocery trip. The practicality of living there every day.

Consider two hypothetical four-bedroom homes.

One is brand-new in an emerging estate. The other is older, closer to established services and well connected to employment.

The new home offers modern finishes and a practical layout.

The older home offers a shorter daily routine.

Neither automatically wins. But comparing the age of their kitchens won’t tell you which is the stronger investment.

Suppose the estate adds 20 minutes each way to a tenant’s commute.

Across five working days, that’s more than three additional hours a week, before school drop-offs or weekend errands.

Some households will happily accept that trade-off for the home, space or price. Others won’t.

Your assessment needs to identify who will want to live there, what alternatives they have and whether the rent reflects the trade-off.

And distance from the CBD is only part of the picture.

An outer suburb near a major hospital, university or employment precinct may be more convenient for your intended tenant than a property closer to the city centre.

The better question is:

How well does this address connect people to the places they actually need to go?

Then there’s the promise of what’s coming.

A proposed school. A future shopping centre. A planned road upgrade.

These could strengthen the location. But a label on a master plan doesn’t tell you when the doors will open.

Before paying for tomorrow’s convenience, establish:

[:] What services are operating today?
[:] Which projects are proposed, approved, funded or under construction?
[:] What happens to the investment if delivery takes several years longer?
[:] How much competing housing could arrive during that time?
[:] Does the purchase price fairly reflect the location as it stands?

There can be opportunity in buying before an area matures. As services and connections improve, the suburb may become more attractive.

But that upside needs to be weighed against the wait, delivery uncertainty and additional housing supply.

A growing population doesn’t automatically mean demand will outpace new construction.

A good new-build investment needs more than a good building.

It needs a location that works today, or a well-supported reason to accept the compromises while it develops.

Buy the future with your eyes open.

You still have to own it in the meantime.

Next week: Infrastructure can change a suburb. But which projects actually change the investment case?

Think property. Think deeper. Think Briq.

10/09/2026

So… where are all the first home buyers?

That might be an uncomfortable question.

But somebody should probably ask it.

For years, we’ve been told that property investors were making it harder for young Australians to buy a home.

Investors had tax advantages.

Investors were competing with first home buyers.

Investors were pushing prices higher.

So the solution sounded simple enough:

Make property investment less attractive.

Change negative gearing.

Change capital gains tax treatment.

Reduce the incentive for investors to buy established homes.

Take some investors out of the market and give first home buyers a better shot.

Well…

We’re starting to see what happens when you actually do that.

And there’s a problem.

The investors are pulling back.

ABS data shows the number of new investor housing loans fell 8.6% in the June quarter alone — the largest quarterly fall since 2022.

So far, so good?

Not exactly.

Because first home buyers aren’t flooding through the door behind them.

Their numbers fell too.

First home buyer loan commitments dropped 2.9% in the same quarter.

More recent mortgage data reportedly shows first home buyer pre-approvals running 11.2% lower than a year ago.

Meanwhile, national home prices have been falling.

Competition has softened.

Investors have retreated.

And yet somehow…

First home buyers are becoming LESS confident about buying a home.

That deserves a much bigger conversation.

Because perhaps we’ve spent years diagnosing the wrong problem.

Maybe the biggest obstacle to home ownership wasn’t the Mum and Dad investor bidding on the house next door.

Maybe it was the fact that homes cost too much to build.

That we don’t build enough of them.

That borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars becomes considerably harder when interest rates rise.

That wages haven’t kept pace with housing costs.

That infrastructure struggles to keep up with population growth.

That planning and construction can be painfully slow and expensive.

And that changing tax policy doesn’t magically make a 25-year-old confident about taking on a $600,000 mortgage.

Removing one buyer doesn’t automatically create another.

That’s the bit we seem to have missed.

And then there’s the rental market.

Because when a first home buyer decides NOT to buy…

Where do you think they live?

Usually, they keep renting.

So now we’ve potentially got fewer investors wanting to buy rental properties…

while the people those policies were supposed to help remain renters for longer.

And rents?

They’re still rising.

ABS data has Australian rents up 3.6% over the past year.

Earlier this year, Cotality estimated the typical Australian rent had increased by around $202 PER WEEK in just five years.

Renters were spending a record 33.1% of median household income just keeping a roof over their heads.

So let’s ask the uncomfortable question:

What exactly did we fix?

We weakened investor confidence.

We haven’t suddenly unleashed an army of first home buyers.

We haven’t solved the rental affordability problem.

And we still haven’t solved the fundamental issue sitting underneath all of it:

Australia needs more housing.

Not different people fighting over the same houses.

More. Houses.

Of course investors aren’t the only reason the market has slowed.

Interest rates matter enormously.

Cost-of-living pressures matter.

Economic uncertainty matters.

Borrowing capacity matters.

But that’s precisely the point.

Housing affordability is complicated.

And maybe treating the Mum and Dad property investor as the convenient villain was always a little too easy.

Because Australia’s housing system needs first home buyers.

It needs owner occupiers.

It needs developers.

It needs builders.

And whether people like admitting it or not…

It needs property investors too.

Around 3.3 million Australians own investment property.

Most own just one.

These aren’t giant corporations controlling entire suburbs.

They’re ordinary Australians making long-term financial decisions while providing a significant portion of the homes other Australians rent.

Perhaps the goal shouldn’t have been figuring out how to push one group out so another group could get in.

Perhaps it should have been figuring out how to build enough housing that both could participate.

Because you don’t solve a housing shortage by rearranging the queue.

You solve it by building more houses.

And if policies designed to make housing more accessible end up discouraging investment, frightening first home buyers AND leaving renters paying more…

At some point, we’re allowed to ask:

Was the problem really the property investor in the first place?

09/09/2026

Happy Thursday! 🕺

08/09/2026

BRIQONOMICS #01

YOUR RENOVATION RETURN MIGHT BE FLATTERING YOU.

Spend $30,000. Increase the rent by $100 a week.

That’s $5,200 a year. A 17.3% gross return on the renovation spend.

Looks impressive. Probably deserves a before-and-after post.

But before you take the credit, ask:

What would the property have rented for if you’d done nothing?

Consider this hypothetical.

Your investment property rents for $500 a week. The tenant leaves, you spend $30,000 refreshing it, and it leases for $600.

Naturally, you attribute the extra $100 to the renovation.

Except comparable properties suggest it could have achieved $550 in its existing condition.

Half the increase was already there.

You spent $30,000 to create an additional $50 a week—not $100.

That’s $2,600 a year, bringing the incremental gross rental return on your renovation spend to approximately 8.7%, before additional costs.

Same property. Same renovation. Very different assessment.

Now add the downtime.

If the work takes four weeks, and the property could otherwise have been occupied throughout that period at $550, there’s another $2,200 in forgone rent to account for.

The new kitchen is starting to get less credit.

Does that make the renovation a bad investment?

Possibly. Possibly not.

It may have replaced a kitchen approaching the end of its useful life, addressed recurring maintenance or added resale value.

Those benefits matter. But they need evidence, rather than being used to rescue a calculation that looked better before someone checked it.

And there’s another question:

Could a smaller, more targeted improvement have achieved a similar result?

Suppose a $12,000 refresh could achieve $585 a week.

The additional $18,000 for the full renovation buys just another $15 a week in rent.

That’s $780 a year from the extra $18,000—approximately a 4.3% incremental gross rental return on that additional spend, before costs.

You would want a convincing reason for spending the difference.

Before approving the work, establish:

[:]What the property could realistically earn in its current condition.
[:]What a targeted refresh could achieve.
[:]What the full renovation could achieve.
[:]The cost, downtime and likely longer-term benefits of each option.

For a mum-and-dad investor, that renovation budget might represent years of savings or an increase in debt.

It deserves more scrutiny than a flattering comparison with an outdated rent.

The market doesn’t owe your renovation a return because you spent the money.

Make the numbers earn your approval.

Think property. Think deeper. Think Briq.

07/09/2026

Apparently, property investors are the problem.

Interesting.

Because Australia has a rental shortage.

We need more homes.

We need more rental supply.

We need billions of dollars of private money invested into housing.

So the Government is actively encouraging large institutional investors into Build-to-Rent with tax concessions designed to make investing in Australian rental housing more attractive.

Read that again.

We need property investors.

We just seem to have developed a strange dislike for them when they’re ordinary Australians.

The Mum and Dad who scraped together another deposit.

The couple carrying a negatively geared property because they’re thinking 20 years ahead.

The investor with one rental who just got hit with another insurance increase, another rates increase, another repair bill and another round of legislation telling them what they can and can’t do with an asset they probably owe the bank hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

Apparently, they’re the greedy ones.

Meanwhile, if you’re an enormous investment fund looking to own hundreds or thousands of Australian rental properties?

Come on in.

Eligible Build-to-Rent developments can access accelerated 4% capital works deductions instead of the ordinary 2.5%.

Eligible fund payments through managed investment trusts can receive a 15% withholding tax rate instead of 30%.

Why?

Because policymakers understand something they don’t seem particularly comfortable saying out loud:

Rental housing needs investors.

Someone has to provide the capital.

Someone has to borrow the money.

Someone has to take the risk.

Someone has to pay for the new roof, the hot water system, the rates, insurance, compliance, maintenance and the mortgage when the property is empty.

For decades, ordinary Australians have been willing to do exactly that.

Not because they’re running charities.

Because they’re trying to build wealth.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

You can provide a good home to another family and want the property to improve your own financial future.

Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Good investors should provide good homes.

Good tenants should be treated fairly.

Bad landlords should be held accountable.

But we need to stop acting as though making money from property investment is somehow morally questionable.

It’s an investment. That’s literally the point.

And here’s the irony.

Keep making residential property ownership harder, more expensive and less attractive for ordinary Australians and they eventually won’t keep buying rental properties.

The houses won’t magically become free.

The renters won’t disappear.

The demand for rental housing won’t disappear.

The ownership will simply change.

From thousands of individual Australians trying to build some financial independence…

to institutions capable of owning thousands of homes each.

Maybe that’s the future Australia wants.

But before we celebrate pushing the Mum and Dad property investor out of the market, we should probably ask ourselves:

Who exactly do we want owning Australia’s rental housing?

28/05/2026

JUST LISTED 🏡

14 Claire Street, Centenary Heights
4 bed | 1 bath | 2 car

OPEN TO INSPECT:
Friday: 5:00-5:30pm
Saturday: 11:15-11:45am

Interest from $796,000
More info here: www.briqproperty.com.au/claire14

25/02/2024

From Monday 4th March 2024, you’ll find us at our new office - suite 9, 120 Russell Street, Toowoomba City.

Our old office will close 5pm on Thursday 29th February and remain closed on the 1st of March while we get set up at our new location.

We’ll still be available on our phones if you need to reach out. Catch you at our new office! 👋

10/04/2023

Recently we celebrated Zak's first year with Briq Property!
We can't wait to see what the next 12 months has in store.

12/10/2022

We’ve loved working with Wild Fig Property Staging in recent times. While our mantra is to see people retain property, if you decide to sell, there is huge value in professionally staging your home to help generate that emotional connection that will translate into a stronger offer!

Staging brings life to an empty property
Contact us for an affordable quote ☺️