A rule change almost nobody in Brisbane has heard about yet

Since September 18, thousands of Brisbane sites are worth more to a developer.

There was almost no media coverage. The question is which sites pick up the value, and how long before the rest of the market notices.

See what the reform actually changes See the first result

A row of contemporary three-storey brick-and-render townhouses at dusk on a Brisbane street, with jacaranda trees and a cyclist passing. — Three-storey townhouse form typical of Brisbane's low-medium density housing areas. Illustration.

The reform

The More Homes, Sooner policy was adopted by Council on August 18. It took effect across the city on September 18.

For proven 3-storey townhouse product, it converts a patchwork of scattered sites into one enormous zone where approval is fast and close to guaranteed. A cleaner pathway between buying a site and holding a permit is money. Less time, less risk, same land. Since September 18, Brisbane has handed that to thousands of parcels at once.

Illustrative site plan of a 42-lot, 3-storey townhouse development on individual lots, arranged around internal streets — *Illustrative 3-storey townhouse development, single planning approval, 42 dwellings, order-of-magnitude a $60M project.*

The market hasn't repriced any of it yet.

The Centrance Screen

47,426 sites. 15,831 survive the first serious screen.

Maps of Brisbane tracing LMR sites through three stages: 47,426 relevant low–medium density sites (ochre); 38,230 that shift from impact to code assessment (vermilion, 81%); 15,831 that survive a physical and constraint screen (teal, 41%). — Counts are parcels, not dwellings. The constraint screen covers physical fit, heritage and flood.

Centrance ran the reform against each parcel individually: shape, zoning, what's actually built on it today. Not the legislation summarised. The legislation applied, parcel by parcel, across the whole city. Nobody else has run it this way.

The Screen found that 38,230 sites move from impact assessment to code assessment. That's value added before a shovel goes in the ground.

15,831 sites survive the frontage, depth and site-constraint screen. The next cut ranks every one of them by the number that actually decides the outcome: gross realisation against total cost to buy, build and finance. The gap between the best sites and the rest is not small. That result is landing now. Subscribers get it first.

"There is no process for holistically monitoring or reporting development approval or assessment timeframes and outcomes in Queensland."

That's not Centrance's complaint. That's the state's own inquiry, after 250 submissions, concluding the evidence doesn't exist anywhere. This is what filling that gap looks like, one reform, one city, every parcel.

The four cuts

The reform tells you where you may build. It doesn't tell you where you should buy.

A cleaner approval pathway changes the economics. It still has to fit the product, clear the site constraints and leave enough margin to make the deal work.

A four-panel diagram narrowing from a full grid of city blocks, to code-assessable parcels, to physically plausible townhouse sites, to a small set of commercially feasible sites shown as solid blocks. — Conceptual. The direction of the analysis, not measured counts.

Planning

Does this site get the fast pathway?

Product fit

Can 3-storey townhouses actually sit on this parcel?

Site constraints

Does frontage, depth or shape kill it?

Economics

Does the return survive acquisition, build, finance and selling costs?

The cut that matters

15,831 sites survive the planning and physical screen. That still doesn't tell us which ones are commercially viable.

The final cut ranks every surviving site by the gap between what a finished project would sell for and what it costs to buy, build and finance. Some sites clear it by a little. Some clear it by a lot. The difference is not a rounding error.

About Centrance

Centrance is a Brisbane development intelligence and economics firm built around one question: does the development actually work?

Why Centrance looks at development this way