50% Rule Gone: Supply Just Got Tighter

A Queensland Court of Appeal ruling has changed how “affordable” can be used in Gold Coast planning — and the second-order effect is less future supply, not more. Three numbers matter: - Cash rate: 4.35%, unchanged on 12 August, with the next meeting not until late September - Gold Coast needs 180,000 new dwellings by 2040 - Some projects could go up to 50% above height limits under planning rules — until the affordability argument was struck out Then we go street by street in Walkerston, where one median hides a two-times spread. Free framework: https://ripe.house/brief-affordable Disclaimer: This video is general information only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Seek professional advice before making investment decisions.

A court has just ruled that luxury apartments do not make housing more affordable. That sounds like a win for buyers. For anyone who already owns property, it is the opposite because the pathway that was quietly delivering hundreds of extra homes just got narrower. Stay with me because I will show you a town where one median price hides a two times spread street by street. Three numbers first. The cash rate is 4.35 percent. It did not move on the 12th of August and the next meeting is not until late September. So for about six more weeks, the borrowing side of your decision is fixed. That is a planning window, not a waiting room. Second number, 180,000. That is how many new dwellings the Gold Coast says it needs by 2040, according to its own deputy mayor. Hold that number because the story is about how the city has actually been getting them. Third number, and this is the one that matters, 33 meters a second is not it. It is 50 percent. Under Gold Coast planning rules, a developer can build up to 50 percent above the height limit if the project ticks certain boxes. One of those boxes was housing choice and affordability. That box has just been taken away. Here is the ruling. The Queensland Court of Appeal found that a council could not justify a luxury high rise exceeding the height limit on the grounds that it improved housing affordability. Justice Shane Doyle wrote that adding apartments aimed at the luxury and more affluent market cannot be reconciled with the ordinary meaning of the word affordability. To do so, he said, would be a distortion of that meaning. Now, legally, that is hard to argue with. The council's own scheme defines affordable housing as suitable for low to moderate income households spending no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. A multimillion dollar beachfront apartment is not that. The court called the earlier reasoning an error in law. But here is what it means on the ground. The building that triggered this was in Balinga, 34 meters, 10 meters above the local limit and more than double the permitted density. And it was not unusual. The acting mayor said over height approvals had happened, in his words, hundreds of times and that the precedent was well and truly gone. In Palm Beach, of more than two dozen towers proposed or built, almost half exceed the height limits. So the mechanism is simple. A city that needs one hundred and eighty thousand new homes has been getting a meaningful share of them by going above code. And the single most useful justification for going above code has just been struck out. One tower in Palm Beach was already paused this week while lawyers read the judgment. And a retired lawyer who has fought these approvals says existing approvals will probably be challenged. Less future supply in a market that is already short. If you own the existing stock, that is not bad news for you. It is a price support, which raises the only question worth asking, which is where supply genuinely cannot respond. That is exactly what the free e-book is built for, ripe dot house slash brief dash affordable. It is the framework we use to read supply and demand before we buy. Link is in the description and the pinned comment. Ten seconds. Grab it and let us get to the data. System watch. Suburb one is Walkerston in the Mackay region of Queensland. One hundredth percentile on our scoring, three thousand four hundred people and about seventy four percent owner occupied. The buy side is a median of