Vacancy's sitting around 1.4% across Brisbane heading into the middle of this year, up from the 0.7 to 0.9% extreme lows of 2022 and 2023 I wrote about at the very start of this whole run. Genuine loosening, and worth acknowledging as a real shift rather than noise.
Still nowhere near the 2.5 to 3% that economists consider a balanced market, and building approvals higher since 2025 haven't yet translated into completions at scale, that's still expected to flow through in earnest from later this year at the earliest.
For landlords, the shift is subtle but real, slightly more competition to fill a vacancy than at the peak of the shortage, slightly less of the desperate multi-application scramble I wrote about back in 2023 and 2024. Tenants are still doing it tough by any historical measure. Just marginally less tough than they were three years ago.