Our friends at Resort Brokers invited me along to their industry seminar last night. They had guest speakers from Urbis and Bambrick Media and plenty of managers were in attendance. Was a great night, highly informative.
Urbis presented first and had some interesting information and data analysis in relation to development through the CBD. The short of it was: Yes, lots of buildings have been completed recently, yes, downward pressure had been placed on rentals… but vacancy rates on new stock are still only at 1.6%, and new projects being completed have fallen off sharply with the remaining to be completed representing a much smaller number than previously. Very few new projects being started, they referred to it as a self-regulating market. Their data indicated that the total volume of development was stabilised and three key drivers are in place to support it. They refer to these key drivers as: P.I.E. Population, Infrastructure and Employment.
The 5km population is still growing rapidly through Brisbane. Brisbane City Council has 5km radius population growth estimated at 12,000 per year, but Urbis sees that as highly conservative, with numbers more at 15,000 – 17,000 per year through the 5km radius CBD.
The second driver is Infrastructure. There’s some massive infrastructure projects currently underway – we covered the New Parallel Runway (NPR) project in July which is a huge overall project at BAC to make our airport the largest capacity airport in the country by 2018. There’s the Queens Wharf Project which Urbis referred to as a ‘game changer’ for Brisbane. I too am really excited to see this now underway. …and of course there’s all the new transport upgrades… New rail lines, the metro subway system, the tunnel networks and freeway upgrades. Massive infrastructure spending is going ahead in South East QLD at the moment in preparation for continued population growth.
Employment is the final driver for the rental market in Brisbane. Urbis showed that apartment supply is leading demand. The more apartments get built, the more people are moving in to the city to take them rather than simply living in the outer suburbs and traveling into the CBD for work.
It was a really interesting presentation and made a refreshing change from the doom and gloom currently being pushed by the media, backed up with a large amount of data meticulously gathered by Urbis since 2012.
Bambrick Media also gave a presentation that I found fascinating. I’ve actually worked with Bambrick in the past for a few mutual clients so I have a lot of respect for them, they’re an excellent online marketing outfit in Brisbane and it was great to hear what they had to say. Running a property portal, I know a thing or two about SEO but these guys didn’t disappoint. Of course they still placed being on RealEstate.com.au as the most important aspect of marketing for managers (and we can always help you with that of course! J) but they also had a lot to say about the importance of Social Media marketing and Google Marketing as well. Keyword optimisation, paid advertising on Google, etc. In terms of the priority Google gives to paid advertising, this is becoming much more important. TheOnsiteManager.com.au have always ranked 1st on Google organically – and this has always driven massive traffic to our site. In fact we now achieve more rental and sales enquiries from our own website for manager’s listings than Domain.com.au. But Google have now changed their layout for mobile devices and place a very large number of paid placements ahead of our first organic placement, meaning we’ve been forced to also pay Google for 1st place positions for the first time in 13 years of business. This is obviously a trend Bambrick are finding for all their clients also, but the good news, as they put it, was paid advertising is very responsive. You hand over the money and the next day your phone starts ringing… as opposed to organic optimisation, which can take years (or in our case decades) to build. He had a lot to say about how effective social marketing is for reaching your specific target and not wasting advertising dollars targeting people who weren’t appropriate to your business. They also showed us some little video clips they prepared for an apartment complex, that absolutely blew me away. Incredible production quality that looked like it came out of Hollywood – not a little SEO firm in Brisbane. It was impressive stuff all round.
After the presentations, Resort Brokers held a Meet and Greet at their beautiful new offices in West End. If you haven’t been down there you really should drop by and say hello to their team – they have done an amazing job with the refurbishment and it was great to meet so many managers. The night seemed like a huge success with people still laughing and chatting away as I headed off home to bed. Thanks for having us Resort Brokers, it was a privilege to be there.