How the Gold Coast ended up with a housing crisis decades in the making

Gold Coast City Council approved its latest round of medium-density rezoning across Southport and Coomera last month, the most sweeping planning changes the city has seen since the state government gazetted the South East Queensland Regional Plan in 2005. The move affects more than 340 hectares of land and will allow structures of up to eight storeys in corridors previously capped at three. It is the clearest signal yet that the city's political and planning class has accepted, however reluctantly, that the suburban low-rise model that built the Gold Coast cannot sustain it.

The timing matters because the pressure has become impossible to ignore. Average house prices on the Gold Coast crossed $1.1 million in the March 2026 quarter, according to the Real Estate Institute of Queensland, up from roughly $650,000 in early 2021. Rental vacancy rates have been sitting below one per cent since late 2023. Meanwhile, the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games — with the Coomera Indoor Sports Centre and Robina Stadium confirmed as venues — is drawing infrastructure investment and population projections that are reshaping how every level of government thinks about the M1 corridor.

The decisions that got us here

The Gold Coast's housing problem is not an accident. It is the accumulated result of specific choices made across four decades. Through the 1990s, the dominant development model was canal estates and low-density residential sprawl pushing south from Surfers Paradise toward Varsity Lakes and west into Ormeau. The Integrated Resort Development approvals of that era, centred on Broadbeach and Main Beach, embedded a tourism-first land use philosophy that priced out permanent residents from the coastal strip. By 2010, the city had effectively divided itself: a resort zone along the beach and a car-dependent suburban fringe stretching to the Logan border.

The state government's 2017 light rail extension from Broadbeach South to Burleigh Heads was supposed to be a circuit-breaker. Gold Coast Light Rail Stage 3, budgeted at $1.2 billion, was approved in 2021 and is now under construction, with a projected 2027 completion date ahead of the Olympics. Transit-oriented development guidelines attached to that project were meant to unlock medium-density housing along the Chirn Park and Miami station precincts. Progress has been slower than planners projected. Land assembly disputes on Gold Coast Highway, particularly between Mermaid Beach and Nobby Beach, stalled several proposed mixed-use towers that had development approval in hand.

Short-term rental platforms compounded the squeeze. Estimates from the Gold Coast Housing and Homelessness Action Group, released in February 2026, put the number of dwellings listed full-time on platforms including Airbnb and Stayz at approximately 11,400 across the local government area — a figure that effectively removes those properties from the long-term rental pool. The Queensland government's short-term rental registration scheme, which came into effect on 1 March 2026, requires hosts to register and imposes a 60-night cap in certain residential zones, but enforcement on the ground remains patchy and landlords in tourism-zoned precincts on the Spit and at Broadbeach Waters face no restriction at all.

What the next phase looks like

Council's new rezoning is intended to address all of these inherited problems simultaneously, which is partly why it has drawn opposition from established residents groups in Benowa and Mudgeeraba, where the density changes are most visible. The Coomera precinct, in particular, is being positioned as a genuine second CBD — a plan that has been on planning documents since the 2010 Gold Coast City Plan but was never fully activated. With the indoor sports centre now a fixed Olympic asset, the political will to push infrastructure spending into that corridor is stronger than it has ever been.

For residents and investors watching this unfold, the practical reality is that the planning rules governing what can be built on a given parcel of Gold Coast land are in transition and will remain so until at least 2028, when a post-Olympic land use review is expected. Anyone holding property in the identified transit corridors between Helensvale and Coolangatta should expect further upzonings. Those in the established hinterland suburbs west of the Pacific Motorway are likely to see slower change, though state government housing targets — Queensland's obligation under the National Housing Accord runs to 53,000 new dwellings in the Gold Coast region by 2029 — mean no suburb is entirely insulated from the pressure to build up.