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In Melbourne, the prices investors are getting for apartments in the secondary market are beginning to cool.
Urbis director of economics and research Malcolm Aikman said new apartment sales in Brisbane jumped 50 per cent in 2015 to touch a new high and bring another 3700 apartments to the market. “Urbis monitored 85 new project launches in 2015, with most activity concentrated in the inner-south precinct, which recorded 43 per cent of the total activity,” he said. But the South East Queensland economy, hampered by the fall in resources and state government budget constraints, is weaker than that in Melbourne or Sydney, and the strong migration north that fuelled previous Brisbane booms has so far not eventuated. Within five kilometres of the CBD, the rental vacancy for apartments has risen to 3.8 per cent, “further fuelling speculation of an oversupply”, warns the Real Estate Institute of Queensland. At the same time, the number of re-sales of inner-city apartments fell 16 per cent in the December quarter and the median sales price slipped by 2.1 per cent.