The Build Market in Southeast Queensland: Why It's Heating Up and What It Takes to Find the Right People
The build market in Southeast Queensland has been busy for a while. But right now, it's entering a different gear and the next three to five years are shaping up to be genuinely unlike anything the market has seen before.
Builders who've never operated in Queensland are opening up here. Sydney-based companies are establishing Southeast Queensland operations. Salaries that used to track well behind Sydney are now closing the gap fast and likely to surpass them.
Here's what's driving it, what's making it hard, and how the market is adapting.
What's Fuelling the Demand
The Olympic pipeline is the obvious headline – athletes' villages, stadiums, transport links, and the supporting urban infrastructure that comes with hosting a global event. But the build boom is much broader than the Games.
The housing crisis is generating enormous demand for apartments, hotels, and mixed-use developments across the region. Mixed-use projects – developments that combine residential towers, retail, hotel, and hospitality in a single complex – are becoming the dominant format, with project values regularly hitting $1 billion or more.
Monique Ehlers, Senior Recruitment Consultant in Brisbane said, "It's extremely busy and it's only going to get busier as we ramp up to the Olympics. Builders that have never operated here before are now setting up because they can see the opportunity."
The land development sector is also under significant pressure. Fast-tracking approvals and cutting red tape can unlock land on paper, but the physical infrastructure including roads, water, and utilities must follow.
The Talent Gap at the Top End
The most acute challenge in the build market right now isn't general headcount, it's major project experience.
When we're talking about $500M+ builds, the pool of site managers and construction managers in Queensland with that scale of experience is genuinely small. Multiple tier one builders are competing for the same people simultaneously.
"The talent pool for people with large-scale major project experience in this market is genuinely thin – and the number of tier ones competing for those same people is only going to grow" Monique said.
Contract administrators are in particularly high demand, with compensation reflecting that. The gap between what strong CA candidates expect and what some clients are willing to pay is one of the most consistent friction points in the market right now.
How Companies Are Getting Creative on Offers
When base salary hits a ceiling, the market finds other ways. Project completion bonuses tied to time and budget targets are becoming more common in the build space. KPI bonuses throughout the project life cycle are being added to packages for engineers. ABN arrangements are being offered to senior hires who prefer the tax flexibility of contracting. Monday-to-Friday schedules and no Saturday site work are being used by some builders to stand out in a crowded market.
"One client bought properties and converted them into apartments to house interstate and international hires. When people were accepting offers and then couldn't find somewhere to live, they decided to solve that problem themselves" Monique explained.
That's not a perk. That's a recruitment strategy. And it's the kind of thinking that's going to define which companies can actually staff up for what's ahead.
Keeping People to the End
One of the most expensive talent problems in construction isn't losing people at the start, it's losing them in the last three to six months of a project.
"You've got a great engineer on a project. Three to six months from completion, they start looking around, not because they're unhappy, but because they don’t know what opportunities are coming up next. They find another role and they move on. And the knowledge they take with them like defect history, the handover context, the decisions that were made and why usually isn’t documented." Monique said.
The best contractors are working harder to show people the pipeline earlier and giving staff a line of sight to the next project before the current one finishes. The Southeast Queensland build market is going to be one of the most active in the country for the next five years. The companies that treat workforce planning as a strategic function are going to have a real edge.
At Stellar Recruitment, we work with builders, developers, and construction professionals navigating Southeast Queensland's biggest growth period in decades. If you're looking to build teams for what's ahead or want to talk through your talent strategy, we'd love to hear from you.
Get in touch with our team today.
