Metro Melbourne Apartments
Metro Melbourne Apartments
It's the most common thing we hear. It's also a 15-year-old reflex. Play along for 2 minutes and look at what the data actually says, with real addresses and live numbers.
Here's a real 2-bedroom apartment that sold in Brisbane in 2019, back when nobody wanted a bar of units. Take a guess before you scroll.
Even though every headline was screaming oversupply, the underlying data was telling a completely different story. This is the apartment nobody wanted in 2019, and it has roughly doubled in value since, now renting near $757 a week.
Every dot is a real 2-bedroom apartment, sold somewhere across Brisbane, Queensland, post-2019.
Even the big modern towers everyone warns about grew strongly, every single one of them up at least +60%. The rising tide lifted the whole asset class. But the over-performers had a clear pattern: of the 48 apartments that beat the median, 43 were established older blocks, not big modern towers. Across all 100, the established blocks returned a median of +89% against +60% for the big towers. The older, human-scale buildings did the heavy lifting, which is exactly what the screen is built to find.
Method, plainly: 2-bed units across metro Brisbane and South East Queensland, from the inner city out to Logan, Ipswich, the Redlands, Moreton Bay, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, sold during 2019, entry prices from about $150k to $650k. The biggest percentage gains came off the cheapest entry points, where a low starting base lifts the percentage, so read those as the top of the range rather than the norm. Established older block versus big modern tower is inferred from the apartment number and building size, so treat it as a sensible proxy. Current values are independent model estimates as at late May 2026, and a model tends to pull outliers toward the middle, so the real spread is probably wider at both ends.
Tap each driver to switch it on and watch the pressure build. None of them moves the market alone. Together, they only point one way.
Independent figures prepared for NSW Treasury ran Melbourne too. Building a brand-new apartment here now costs about $770,000, and that is the conservative number. Yet you can still buy an established apartment for well under half of that. Here is exactly where the build cost goes, and why nothing new can be added at the price the existing stock sells for.
Almost 3,000 builders went under in FY25, and it is only getting worse. Rising build costs have made these projects unviable for most small and mum-and-pop builders.
Roughly 140 days just for a development approval, before a brick is laid, on top of heavy planning red tape. Supply cannot react quickly even when it needs to.
This is essentially the 2023 picture. Costs have climbed about 6% a year since while apartment prices stayed flat, so the gap only widens.
Build-cost breakdown from the Centre for International Economics report for NSW Treasury (2024), Melbourne mid-rise, all-in including developer margin. Report total was about $749k in 2023; held conservatively to about $770k. Builder insolvencies: ASIC, FY25. Existing-apartment price reflects sales in the inner-west suburbs in this report. General advice only.
Here is each driver that powered Brisbane in 2019, beside where Melbourne sits in 2026. In several places, Melbourne's version isn't softer. It's sharper.
Honestly, we can't predict the future, and we won't pretend to. Anyone who hands you a guaranteed number is someone to walk away from. So instead of guessing, let's just lay out what's actually true right now.
This is the part most people miss. Brisbane ran its cycle in a much cheaper world to build in. Melbourne is doing it in a far more expensive one, which makes the supply drought even harder to break.
Add those up and the gap between buying an existing apartment and building a new one has only widened. The cheaper it stays to buy versus build, the longer new supply stays missing, and the longer the squeeze runs.
We can't answer that for you, and we wouldn't try to. But it's the one question we'd want answered before deciding apartments weren't for us.
Set the budget you'd actually buy at. We'll show you what the weakest, the typical, and the strongest of our 100 would mean for a Melbourne apartment that repeats their path.
We'll build it out year by year, value, rent, yield and cashflow, plus a branded report you can keep and we'll email a copy. Pop your details in and it unlocks straight away.
→ Scroll to your right to see the rest of the table
Want to see this for real Melbourne suburbs? Our suburb calculator lets you check directly what some of the best performing Melbourne markets look like, suburb by suburb.
Explore the Melbourne Apartment Suburb Calculator: 50 of our top Melbourne suburbs, where you pick a suburb and watch this same structural thesis play out locally, so you can see where your money could actually go. Or read the full Metro Melbourne Apartments report. If it stacks up for you, let's talk. If it doesn't, don't.
| Driver | Brisbane 2019 | Melbourne 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| New apartment supply | 46% below average | 72 to 91% below average |
| Rental vacancy | around 2% | 1.3% and tightening |
| Population added in a year | +52,600 | +105,030 |
| Price vs build cost | below replacement cost | 20 to 40% below |
Back in 2019 the Brisbane headlines screamed oversupply. Melbourne's headlines say the same thing today. The data, then and now, told a different story.