Some further comments and charts on building approvals
Some further charts following previous comments on building approvals in Townsville not being catastrophic. I have updated some charts from previous years on residential building approvals related to population for the major metropolitan and regional councils. For consistency this continues with amalgamated councils for Cairns, Rockhampton and Sunshine Coast. This is dwelling approvals from ABS for the 9 months FY YTD.
While Townsville has fallen just below Cairns on this measure that gap is only slight and well above activity in Mackay et al. Townsville had previously been relatively high on this measure. Also as commented at Conus all the higher activity is weighted to SEQ.
We can also break this down into the different components of houses and units.
Obviously differences in demographics and land supply between councils here. Just on houses Cairns isn’t rating too badly. However Cairns has a significantly higher proportion of existing unit housing stock than most comparable regional councils and this remains the component that has been missing since the GFC. Also plenty of warnings around currently of potential oversupply from that apartment boom in Brisbane.
Last to my comment on listless activity in Port Douglas a graph of dwelling approvals in Port Douglas SA2 related to dwelling approvals as a component of the entire Douglas – Daintree SA3, monthly with a 12 month moving average.
Oops not the best graph. PDSA2 is the lower blue line. Damn you Excel.
cairnseconomy 
Mark , well done on the new site. In regards to Townsville numbers I would suggest the situation is slightly worse than numbers indicate. There is a residual 20-30 dwellings per month driven by Defence Housing who have started a program to build 1500 dwellings over the next few years, when this is taken into account it would leave private sector demand very poor indeed. Whilst DHA are building dwellings at various locations around Townsville most of these approvals will present in sudden jumps of approvals in Oonoonba and Rasmussen
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