There’s a new reason to linger a little longer in the inner north.

The Greenhouse Newstead — the latest venture from Rebelo Group, the team behind Stanton and The Wolf — has just opened on the waterfront, and it’s already shaping up as one of the most considered dining experiences Brisbane has seen in years.

This isn’t a typical restaurant opening. Part all-day dining destination, part garden bar, part riverside retreat — The Greenhouse has been built around the way people in this neighbourhood actually like to live. Sunlight bounces off still water terraces, greenery spills through the open-air space, and an open-fire kitchen helmed by Executive Chef Evan White turns out rotisserie chicken, slow-cooked Pyrenees lamb shoulder, woodfired pizza and dry-aged duck — dishes designed to be shared slowly across an afternoon that refuses to end.

“We wanted to bring together architecture, nature and dining into one experience,” says founder Fabian Rebelo. “Something that feels effortless, but considered at every touchpoint.”

It’s exactly the kind of addition that makes living in Newstead feel like a very good decision.

Meanwhile, just around the corner…

Gasworks Plaza has also welcomed In Teglia Pizzoteca — bringing Rome’s famous rectangular pizza-by-the-tray culture to the precinct — alongside Sunnyside Sliced for New York-style slices. The inner north’s food scene shows no sign of slowing down.

If you’ve been thinking about making a move in Newstead, Teneriffe or the surrounding precinct, you know where to find us.

Over the past few weeks, I have spoken with a number of owners in Newstead and Teneriffe — intelligent, financially sophisticated investors — who are reconsidering their positions in light of the May 2026 Federal Budget. The concern is understandable. The noise has been significant.

But when you separate the noise from the data, the picture looks very different. This is my honest, unfiltered view — backed by the most current research from CBRE, ANZ, Domain, Knight Frank, Ray White and Cotality.

The Triple Whammy — and Why It Hasn’t Changed the Fundamentals

I want to acknowledge something directly before making the case for holding: the current market unease is real, and it is legitimate. Property owners right now are contending with a genuine triple whammy — three significant headwinds hitting simultaneously.

Interest rates have risen sharply and remained elevated longer than most forecasters predicted. For negatively geared investors, the holding cost pressure is real — particularly on assets purchased before the rate cycle began.

The Federal Budget landed in May with changes to negative gearing and CGT that, while not affecting existing owners, generated uncertainty and noise across the market — enough to cause many otherwise confident investors to pause.

Geopolitical instability — the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, tensions in the Middle East, and the broader impact on global energy and commodity markets — has created a backdrop of macro-economic anxiety that filters into investor sentiment everywhere, including here.

All three are real. None of them change the structural case for holding a quality inner-Brisbane apartment. Here is why.

First — What the Budget Actually Did (and Didn’t Do) to You

If you owned your property before 7:30pm on 12 May 2026, nothing has changed. You remain fully entitled to negative gear your investment and retain the 50% CGT discount. The legislation is explicit — existing owners are grandfathered entirely.

The changes only affect new purchases of established properties made after that date, and even then only from 1 July 2027. For owners of well-located, established inner-Brisbane apartments, the budget has arguably strengthened your position. It redirects future investor demand away from competing established stock. It makes your asset harder to replace. And because new builds remain fully exempt from the changes, the only way a rational investor can replicate your position is to buy new — which, as I’ll explain below, is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to deliver.

The Supply Gap Is Not a Talking Point. It Is Arithmetic.

CBRE’s most recent apartment outlook forecasts that Brisbane needs approximately 16,000 new dwellings per year to meet population demand. It is currently delivering 4,600 apartments annually. That is a structural shortfall of nearly 12,000 homes every year — and CBRE forecasts this gap will push vacancy rates from their current 1.1% down to 0.7% by 2030.

JLL and The Urban Developer have separately confirmed that construction cost inflation and labour shortages — particularly in Queensland ahead of the 2032 Games — are continuing to constrain new supply. BDO’s March 2026 housing report describes new project feasibility as “challenging,” with elevated costs, tight contracting capacity and prolonged approval timeframes meaning projects take far longer to reach the market than the headline approvals numbers suggest.

Colliers has framed it most directly: Brisbane is facing a narrowing development window, worsening housing shortages and rising construction constraints that are creating a “fundamentally different investment environment.” The owners who benefit most from that environment are the ones already inside it.

The Numbers Are Not Speculative

Cotality’s June 2026 data shows Brisbane dwelling values rose 19.7% over the past 12 months — the median now sitting at approximately $1,116,180. ANZ Research forecasts 9.7% growth for Brisbane in 2026 alone — one of the strongest projections of any capital city. Brisbane has now delivered three consecutive years of double-digit growth: 12.1%, 13.3%, 9.7%.

Domain’s chief economist Dr Nicola Powell has confirmed that Brisbane’s median unit price grew 23% in the past year and is on track to overtake Sydney as Australia’s most expensive capital city unit market in the second half of 2026. “If you had said five years ago that Brisbane units would be on track to surpass Sydney, no one would have believed you,” Powell observed.

Knight Frank’s 2026 Wealth Report names Queensland as Australia’s luxury market powerhouse, with decade-long price growth surpassing every other capital city. The price ceiling for super-prime Brisbane apartments surged from $9.2 million to $14 million in just 12 months — now exceeding $48,000 per square metre. The global ultra-high-net-worth population is forecast to grow 46% by 2031. Increasingly, Brisbane is where that wealth is flowing.

Ray White’s 2026 Luxury Outlook Report reaches the same conclusion: Queensland has displaced Sydney and Melbourne as the dominant force in Australian prestige property growth.

The Olympics Cycle Has Barely Started

CBRE analysed residential price performance across every Olympic host city since 1996. The finding is consistent and unambiguous: average residential price growth in the four years after the Games was 42.5% — compared to 23.3% in the four years leading up to the event. The Games are not the peak. They are the beginning of the next phase.

Brisbane’s position today mirrors Sydney’s before the 2000 Games: record interstate migration, genuine housing shortage, $120 billion in committed infrastructure spending, and underlying economic fundamentals that no other Australian city currently matches. API Magazine reported this month that investors are already “racing the clock before the Olympic construction crunch intensifies” — with supply shortages, population growth and construction constraints outweighing the impact of higher interest rates.

The Olympic Stadium is within walking distance of Newstead. The infrastructure is already committed. The trades and labour that would otherwise build competing supply are being absorbed by the Olympic pipeline. That pipeline does not release them until after 2032.

Your Apartment Cannot Be Rebuilt at What It’s Worth Today — and the Gap Is Getting Wider

Construction costs in Brisbane have risen more than 40% since 2020. But the more important story is what is happening now — and why that gap between replacement cost and current market value is accelerating, not stabilising.

The global conflicts of the past three years have had a direct and material impact on the cost of building anything in Australia. Steel, aluminium, copper, timber, glass, concrete — the raw materials that go into every apartment — are all affected by elevated fuel prices, disrupted supply chains, and the redirection of global manufacturing capacity toward military and reconstruction demand. The conflict in Ukraine alone disrupted a significant portion of global steel and aluminium supply; the Middle East tensions have kept energy costs elevated, which flows through to virtually every construction input.

On top of that, Queensland’s construction labour market is being fundamentally reshaped by the 2032 Olympic pipeline. A shortage of approximately 43,000 construction workers is forecast in Queensland ahead of the Games — workers who are being absorbed into Olympic infrastructure projects and who will not be available to build new residential supply. When labour is scarce and materials are expensive, the economics of new apartment development become increasingly marginal.

The result: the cost to build a comparable apartment today — in a tightly held inner-city precinct, with established body corporate, premium amenity, river proximity, and the quality of finishes that characterise Cavcorp buildings — would materially exceed what most of these apartments are currently trading at. That replacement cost gap is not a theoretical concept. It is the reason feasibility on new Brisbane apartment projects continues to be described as “challenging” by BDO, Colliers and JLL, even as the need for supply has never been more acute.

When replacement cost exceeds market value, the market corrects. The gap closes. It always does. And in Brisbane’s case, with geopolitical pressures on materials costs, Olympic demand on labour, and a structural supply shortfall of nearly 12,000 apartments per year, the forces pushing that gap wider are not temporary. They are structural.

Brisbane apartment rents are forecast to grow 6.5% in 2026 — ahead of Sydney at 4.5% and Melbourne at 4%, according to JLL. CBRE forecasts median apartment rents will grow 24–27% between 2025 and 2030. The income side of these investments is strengthening, not weakening.

My View

The owners who will look back on 2026 with regret are not those who held. They are those who sold in a moment of noise and missed the decade that followed.

The budget has not changed existing owners’ positions. The supply has not improved. The Olympics is six years away — and the historical data shows the growth cycle around the Games accelerates after the closing ceremony, not before. Replacement cost is rising. Yields are rising. The precinct — Newstead, Teneriffe, the Newstead Peninsula — is becoming more irreplaceable, not less.

If there is a specific number you need to achieve from a sale to justify moving on, I will have that conversation honestly with you. But the data, from the most credible institutional sources available, does not support selling now.

The window to be well-positioned when this city reaches its inflection point is closing. You’re already on the right side of it.

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Ari Shahbazifar is the director of sales at Cavalé, with 25 years of exclusive representation across Cavcorp’s portfolio in Newstead and Teneriffe. This article represents his personal analysis and is not financial advice. Sources: CBRE Apartment Outlook 2026, ANZ Research April 2026, Cotality June 2026, Domain (Dr Nicola Powell), Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026, Ray White Luxury Outlook 2026, The Urban Developer/JLL, API Magazine, Colliers, BDO Housing Report March 2026.

Brisbane’s most delicious month is officially here. Dine BNE City is back for June 2026 — the city’s biggest-ever dining program — and with 130 exclusive experiences across more than 80 venues, there has never been a better time to eat your way through the CBD and surrounds.

Running the entire month of June, Dine BNE City is spread across four distinct categories: Morning Edition (breakfast and brunch deals), Let’s Do Lunch (midday specials), Supper Club (after-dark dining), and Bar Safari (drinks and bites). Each category brings something different — from $15 bacon-and-egg burgers with coffee at Mr Edward’s Alehouse, to late-night seafood set menus at Tillerman, to three-course Nonna’s Favourites at Doughcraft for $78.

New for 2026 is the Morning Edition category, which makes the case for starting your day in the city. Riverbar & Kitchen is serving corn tostadas with watermelon mimosas, while Gather Bistro and the soon-to-open Goldie are offering $1 hash browns with your morning coffee. A compelling argument for the commute.

For evenings, the Bar Safari offers are particularly strong. Blackbird Brisbane’s ‘Adult Happy Meal’ — boujee chicken nuggets or a cheeseburger with fries and sparkling wine for $35 — has already generated serious buzz. Pompette Champagne Bar is doing moules frites with wine or sparkling for $40. The Brasserie Bar at Naldham House has tapas and mini cocktails for $24.

A series of one-off chef-led dinners and limited-seat events also runs throughout the month — these book out quickly, so it’s worth checking the full program early.

For those of you living in Newstead and Teneriffe, the CBD is ten minutes away and the precinct’s own dining scene — Evra, GIGI, Beccofino, The Standard Market — continues to hold its own against anything the city has to offer. But June is the month to cross the river.

Dine BNE City 2026

When: 1–30 June 2026
Where: Brisbane CBD and surrounds
Cost: Varies by venue and offer
→ View the full program at dine.brisbane.qld.au

The national auction clearance rate just hit 52.5% — the third consecutive fall following the RBA’s third consecutive rate hike to 4.35%. Brisbane printed 31.9%.

On paper, that looks alarming. In practice, for buyers and owners in the premium end of Newstead and Teneriffe, it tells a very different story — and arguably a reassuring one.

What the headline number actually means

Auction clearance rates measure the percentage of properties that sell under the hammer versus those passed in. When rates fall, the conventional read is that the market is cooling. But that framing misses something important: the number of properties being brought to auction is also falling. Brisbane recorded just 160 auctions last week, down from 212 the week prior. Fewer sellers are testing the market, which means the clearance rate is being dragged down by hesitancy at the supply end — not a collapse in demand.

For context, Brisbane’s auction market represents a small fraction of the city’s total transaction volume. The majority of prestige property in Newstead, Teneriffe and the inner precinct trades off-market or by expression of interest — not under the hammer. Auction clearance rates are largely irrelevant as a measure of what’s happening in the segment that matters to most Cavalé clients.

The rate rise argument that nobody is making

Here is the counterintuitive case: rising interest rates, at this stage of Brisbane’s cycle, are not uniformly bad for premium property owners.

When rates rise, buyer purchasing power falls — but that compression disproportionately affects first home buyers and mortgage-sensitive buyers in the $500k–$1.5M bracket. At $2M and above, buyer profiles shift. Many are equity-rich, asset-heavy, and less reliant on leverage to complete a purchase. Some are buying with no mortgage at all.

What rate rises do to the market at scale is reduce the pool of competing buyers for mainstream stock. That sounds negative. But for owners of premium, tightly held property in an undersupplied precinct, it concentrates serious attention on a smaller number of genuinely compelling assets — and removes the noise of speculative buyers who were never going to transact anyway.

Brisbane’s structural position hasn’t changed

The RBA can move rates. It cannot move the Olympic Games. It cannot move the $120 billion infrastructure pipeline. It cannot resolve a vacancy rate of 0.6% — already the tightest in the country — or manufacture new supply in a precinct where the development pipeline is effectively closed.

ANZ is still forecasting 9.7% price growth for Brisbane in 2026. Canstar analysis suggests Brisbane median prices could rise more than $100,000 this year alone. The structural supply-demand imbalance that has been driving Brisbane’s outperformance since 2020 is not a rate-sensitive phenomenon — it is a decade-long structural deficit meeting a decade of accelerating inward migration.

What this means in practice

If you are considering selling in the current environment, the noise around rate rises creates hesitancy in some vendors — which means less competing stock coming to market at exactly the moment when qualified buyers are still active. That is a sellers’ market condition dressed up as a buyers’ market headline.

If you are considering buying, the same dynamic applies in reverse. The buyers who step back from the market when sentiment turns are rarely the buyers who win over a five-year horizon. The buyers who have consistently outperformed in this precinct are those who moved when the narrative was loudest — not when it was quietest.

The headline says the market is cooling. The fundamentals say Brisbane is in the early stages of its most significant decade of growth. We know which one we are betting on.

Source: My Housing Market / Property Update. Auction data week ending 9 May 2026. ANZ and Canstar forecasts as published May 2026.

The world’s ultra-wealthy are moving capital — and Brisbane is now on their shortlist.

The Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026, released this week, delivers one of the most significant assessments of global wealth concentration in the 20-year history of the publication. Its conclusion for Australian property markets is unambiguous: the country sits at the intersection of two of the most powerful forces shaping global real estate — an accelerating domestic wealth boom and a structural shift in where the world’s richest individuals choose to live.

The headline number is striking. Globally, 89 people cross the US$30 million net worth threshold every single day. The world’s ultra-high-net-worth population — those worth more than US$30 million — reached 713,626 in 2026, up 30% from five years ago. The US accounts for 41% of all newly created ultra-wealthy individuals, but the story of where that wealth flows next is more geographically complex — and for Australia, more flattering — than the headline suggests.

Australia’s wealth trajectory is outlier territory

Australia’s ultra-high-net-worth population is forecast to grow by nearly 60% over the next five years, reaching 26,095 individuals — roughly one in every 1,000 residents. That pace puts it among the fastest-growing wealth markets in the developed world. More telling still: Australia’s billionaire population is forecast to increase by 77% by 2031, placing it fourth globally for billionaire growth, behind only Saudi Arabia, Poland and Sweden.

Knight Frank attributes this to more than rising asset prices. Australia’s wealth creation story, the report argues, is structurally deep — anchored in agriculture and mining, and increasingly driven by finance, business services and a maturing technology sector. In a world where wealth is becoming more mobile, that combination of durability and diversification matters.

Brisbane enters the global luxury conversation

The report’s Prime International Residential Index — which tracks luxury property price movements across more than 100 markets globally — names Brisbane alongside Miami and Mumbai as markets with material upside ahead. That is a significant designation. The PIRI 100, now in its 20th year, is one of the most closely watched benchmarks in global residential property.

The data supports the call. Super-prime apartment values in Brisbane have surged past the $9 million ceiling to trade above $15 million in just 12 months. Super-prime stock is now transacting above $48,000 per square metre. US$1 million buys 5% less Brisbane real estate today than it did in 2020 — a measure of how quickly the market has re-rated.

“Brisbane’s rise is part of a wider story about Queensland’s appeal to wealth,” said Adam Ross, McGrath’s head of international and private clients. “What we’re seeing is the convergence of major infrastructure investment, a favourable planning environment and growing international awareness ahead of the Olympics. There’s a real can-do attitude in the city. You can get an 80-storey tower approved in less than a year. Anywhere else in Australia, that’s simply not happening.”

Luxury prices across Brisbane grew 2.1% in 2025. The Gold Coast followed at 2.8%, with prestige homes above $22.5 million becoming increasingly common. Knight Frank’s analysis suggests the structural conditions for sustained outperformance are firmly in place.

What the wealthy actually want is changing

Perhaps the most consequential finding in the 2026 report is not about price growth at all. It is about demand composition. Knight Frank identifies a fundamental shift in luxury consumption — what it terms the “transformation economy” — in which the world’s wealthiest buyers are moving away from conspicuous acquisition toward investments that support personal wellbeing, longevity and a sense of belonging.

“Luxury is fundamentally evolving from the simple accumulation of goods towards more meaningful, experience-led consumption,” the report states. “Consumer choices underpin the growth of the transformation economy, prioritising investments that facilitate personal growth, wellness and a sense of belonging.”

This is not a marginal preference shift. It is reshaping how luxury residential product is conceived, positioned and priced. Developers and investors who recognised this shift early — embedding wellness infrastructure as a core design principle rather than an amenity afterthought — are increasingly the ones capturing the most discerning buyers at the top of the market.

The window is narrowing

Knight Frank’s broader framing in the 2026 report is deliberately cautious. The global economy faces renewed inflationary pressures, fractured supply chains and the residual effects of geopolitical conflict on energy markets. Central banks are navigating a more complex environment than at any point in the past decade.

In that context, the report identifies prime residential property — particularly in markets with structural supply constraints, strong underlying demand and genuine global appeal — as one of the more defensible allocations available to private capital.

For a city that spent two decades being underwritten as Australia’s third market, the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026 represents something of a formal reclassification. Brisbane is not emerging. It has emerged.

Source: Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026, 20th Edition. Knight Frank Prime International Residential Index (PIRI 100). Data: Knight Frank Wealth Sizing Model. Quotes: McGrath International & Private Clients.

In 1970, a Danish longitudinal study of 2,872 pairs of twins produced a finding that cut against decades of received wisdom about human health. Genes, the researchers concluded, determine roughly 20 percent of how long a person lives. The remaining 80 percent is shaped by environment and lifestyle.

That research would later inform Dan Buettner’s Blue Zone studies — the demographic analysis that mapped the world’s longest-lived communities from Okinawa to Sardinia and identified their shared characteristics. What those communities had in common was not exceptional healthcare access or unusual genetic profiles. It was the design of daily life: walkable environments, embedded social structures, and proximity to physical activity, whole food, and meaningful community. Longevity, the data suggested, was less a medical outcome than an urban planning one.

Carlos Moreno, a Franco-Colombian urbanist and scientific director at Paris-Sorbonne, arrived at a complementary conclusion from the city planning side. In a framework he called chrono-urbanism, Moreno argued that the relevant unit of urban measurement was not distance but time — specifically, the time required to access the six functions essential to daily life: work, commerce, healthcare, education, food, and leisure. His model, presented at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, proposed that a well-designed neighbourhood could deliver all six within 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo adopted the framework as policy, and the ville du quart d’heure became a core pillar of her 2020 re-election platform. The concept has since been implemented in varying forms in Melbourne, Milan, Portland, and a growing number of global cities. Urban economists and public health researchers have documented measurable improvements in resident wellbeing, physical activity rates, and social cohesion in districts that meet the criteria.

The Commercial Translation

What the policy literature describes in population-level terms, the real estate sector has been quantifying at the asset level. The Global Wellness Institute’s Build Well to Live Well report, updated in 2025, found that wellness-integrated residential properties in the middle and upper market segments command a price premium of 10–25% relative to comparable conventional stock. The wellness real estate market reached $584 billion globally in 2024 — the fastest-growing sector in the wellness economy, expanding at an annual compound rate of 19.5% since 2019, with projections reaching $1.1 trillion by 2029.

The GWI identifies several factors driving that premium: proximity to fitness and health infrastructure, access to community amenity, walkability, and the degree to which a development actively curates its surrounding environment rather than simply occupying it.

The shift in retail anchoring has reinforced this dynamic from a different direction. A 2017 Wall Street Journal analysis found that fitness operators had become sought-after anchor tenants in major retail developments — replacing department stores as the category most reliably capable of generating daily foot traffic, increasing dwell time, and sustaining the ecosystem of surrounding retailers. More than 57 million Americans were gym members at the time of that report, with membership growing 26% over the prior decade and skewing significantly toward higher-income households. The gym had migrated from amenity to infrastructure.

Long Island, Newstead

Against that backdrop, Cavcorp’s Long Island precinct in Newstead represents a deliberate exercise in applied urban theory rather than speculative development.

The precinct is anchored by Total Fusion Platinum — a four-level, 40-plus class wellness facility operating across Brisbane’s Newstead Gasworks district. At capacity, Total Fusion accommodates more than 10,000 members and generates over 2,000 daily active member visits through the precinct. By the metrics the retail analysts apply, it functions as exactly what the research describes: an anchor tenant that drives foot traffic, creates routine, and supports the viability of the surrounding commercial environment.

The wider precinct extends that framework into the residential interface. Farmers’ markets, curated dining and retail, piazza activations, and a locally produced community lifestyle guide — The 15 Minute City — have been integrated as part of an ongoing placemaking strategy. The Cavalé+ management program, operating across Cavcorp’s residential portfolio, supports resident activation and community engagement at the building level.

The investment thesis is supported by Cavcorp’s internal data across its Newstead residential portfolio: rental yields have tracked consistently 2% or more above comparable non-wellness-integrated stock in the same precinct, with capital growth differentials of up to 28% and measurable improvements in tenant retention relative to market benchmarks.

The Underlying Principle

What distinguishes the most effective examples of this model — whether in public policy or private development — is the degree to which wellness is treated as infrastructure rather than amenity. The 15-minute city works not because it offers wellness as an optional feature, but because it removes the friction between residents and the behaviours that sustain health. The Blue Zones work not because residents are disciplined, but because their environments make healthy choices the default.

The commercial real estate literature increasingly reflects the same insight. Buildings and precincts that embed wellness into the daily structure of resident life — not as a rooftop add-on but as a design principle — are outperforming those that do not, across yield, capital growth, and occupancy metrics.

The data supports a straightforward conclusion: the quality of a neighbourhood’s design is not incidental to the value of property within it. It is a primary determinant.