How the Sunshine Coast Became One of Queensland's Toughest Places to Find a Home

The Sunshine Coast Regional Council approved its first dedicated housing strategy in 2023, but the conditions that made it necessary were decades in the making. Today, median house prices across the region sit above $950,000, and rental vacancy rates remain below one percent in suburbs from Caloundra to Noosa Hinterland, figures that would have seemed implausible to the planners who drafted the region's first statutory plan in the early 2000s.

National property data released this week shows first home buyers are pulling back across Australia as prices soften marginally from post-pandemic peaks. On the Sunshine Coast, that softening has been modest at best. The region absorbed an extraordinary wave of internal migration during 2020 and 2021, when Australians fleeing Sydney and Melbourne drove a 22 percent spike in median prices in a single calendar year. The infrastructure, the land release and the political will to respond simply were not ready for what arrived.

The Decisions That Shaped the Crunch

Three intersecting forces drove the region to where it stands. The first was the deliberate low-density character protected under the Sunshine Coast Planning Scheme 2014, which prioritised environmental corridors and coastal amenity over infill development in established suburbs like Buderim, Mooloolaba and Kawana Waters. The second was the explosive growth of short-term rental accommodation, particularly on platforms like Airbnb, which the Queensland Government only moved to regulate at a state level in late 2023, years after the damage to long-term rental supply had accumulated. The third was the pace of the Maroochydore CBD construction program, which committed council and the SunCentral development authority to a 53-hectare greenfield city centre without a mandatory affordable housing component locked in from the start.

Council planners flagged the rental supply problem as early as 2019, when a report to the Sunshine Coast Regional Council noted that short-term letting platforms had removed an estimated 2,400 dwellings from the permanent rental pool across the local government area. By 2022, community housing provider Sunshine Coast Housing Company reported a waiting list of more than 900 households. The region's population, which hit 380,000 at the 2021 census, is projected by the Queensland Government Statistician's Office to reach 500,000 by 2041.

What the Planning System Is Now Trying to Fix

The Sunshine Coast Regional Council's Housing and Homelessness Action Plan, adopted in March 2023, identified 14 priority actions including rezoning investigations along the Maroochydore Road and Nicklin Way corridors, and accelerating approvals for build-to-rent projects near Sippy Downs and the Sunshine Coast University Hospital precinct at Birtinya. The hospital itself, expanded in 2023 to 738 beds, created an employment anchor that planners are now trying to surround with medium-density housing that simply does not yet exist in sufficient volume.

The state government's Housing Availability and Affordability Plan, released in late 2024, gave councils additional powers to mandate affordable housing contributions from developers on sites above a certain threshold. Whether Sunshine Coast's council uses those powers aggressively in the Maroochydore CBD, where SunCentral is still selling parcels to private developers along First Avenue and Duporth Avenue, will be the clearest signal yet of how seriously local decision-makers are treating the crisis they helped create.

For prospective buyers and renters, the practical reality is that meaningful new supply in established coastal suburbs is at least three to five years away. Apartment projects approved in Maroochydore and Birtinya through 2024 and 2025 carry typical two-bedroom list prices between $720,000 and $850,000, well above the threshold accessible to first home buyers using the Queensland First Home Owner Grant. Community housing organisations including Homelessness Solutions Sunshine Coast continue to flag that emergency accommodation demand is running at record levels heading into the 2026 winter. The decisions made between 2014 and 2022 left very little room for error. The region is now living with the consequences.