Greater Brisbane added close to 73,000 residents in the last financial year. Overseas migration did most of the heavy lifting, over 44,000 of that number, with interstate migration and natural increase filling out the rest.
I keep coming back to this figure because it's genuinely the root cause behind most of what I've written about this year. The vacancy rate. The price resilience through rate hikes. The competition at every open home. None of it is mysterious once you sit with a number like this against a housing supply pipeline that's been constrained by the exact builder insolvency crisis I wrote about in April.
Rates matter. Policy matters. But population growth against constrained supply is the engine underneath almost everything else in this market right now.