Where Brisbane Is Actually Building in 2026 (Every Council Application, Mapped to a Street)

When you buy a Brisbane property, the only thing the seller has to tell you about development next door is what is already approved and built. The pipeline of plans submitted to council but not yet decided is invisible in the contract. Property listings do not mention them either.

Council publishes every application on Brisbane City Council's Developmenti portal, but one address at a time. There is no way to ask "how much building work is happening on the street I am about to bid on" unless you manually search dozens of records.

So we built it. Property X-Ray's database holds 118,197 Brisbane City Council development applications going back to 2004, with 6,845 submitted in the last 12 months alone. We matched those against the national address database and pulled out the streets and suburbs where buyers are most likely to wake up next to a construction fence.

Brisbane streets with the most DAs in the last 24 months

These are the Brisbane streets where the most actual construction applications were submitted to council between May 2024 and May 2026. We are counting new houses, lot subdivisions, townhouse and unit developments, big renovations, and commercial projects. Paperwork-only entries (building compliance approvals, minor design adjustments, earthworks) are left out because they don't actually change what your street looks like.

Rochedale appears three times in the top 10 alone. Gardner Street, Priestdale Road and Woodcarver Drive together account for 40 applications in two years. New Farm shows up twice in the top half (Browne and Harcourt Streets) but for very different reasons. The story underneath the count depends entirely on what kind of building work is happening.

The suburb pattern

Top-line counts are interesting. The category mix is where the actual story lives. A suburb with 80 new-house DAs looks completely different from a suburb with 80 subdivision DAs, even though the total is the same.

Three different stories, same table

The subdivision belts

Look at Acacia Ridge, Salisbury, Bridgeman Downs and Chermside. Sixty to seventy percent of their DA activity is subdivision. Bigger lots being cut into smaller ones. If you buy a half-acre block in Bridgeman Downs today, the lot next door has a real chance of being two or three lots by the time you sell. Acacia Ridge alone has 45 subdivision DAs against 4 new-house DAs. That ratio tells you the suburb's housing density is about to change.

Rochedale is the extreme case. 53 lot subdivisions in 24 months on top of 64 new-house applications. That is the master-planned greenfield development showing up in council records. If you are a Rochedale buyer, the streetscape in five years will not look like the streetscape in your photos. Almost every other paddock is currently in planning.

The character-renovation zones

Paddington, Bardon, Ashgrove, Bulimba, Ascot, Highgate Hill. These are the inner-ring character suburbs where splitting blocks into smaller ones is rare (heritage and character protections make it hard) but renovating is plentiful. Paddington has 20 renovation applications and only 11 subdivisions in the same period. Bardon has 78 new-house applications and just 8 subdivisions. These are established suburbs with almost no vacant land left, so most of those new houses are replacing existing dwellings.

If you buy here, your neighbours are renovating, not subdividing. The streetscape character holds. The houses get bigger and more expensive, but the density doesn't change much.

The townhouse and unit corridors

Kangaroo Point sits at 29 multi-unit DAs against 15 new-house DAs and 10 subdivisions. That is the highest multi-dwelling concentration in the data set. Toowong (22 multi-unit), Chermside (19), Carina (16), Annerley (14), Morningside (13) round out the cluster.

These suburbs are where Brisbane is going up rather than out. If your investment thesis is "buy the house, hold the dirt", these suburbs make sense. If your thesis is "buy a quiet street and watch it stay quiet", these suburbs do not.

Why this matters at the bidding desk

• Future neighbours. Subdivision DAs three doors down change what your fence line looks like, and not always for the better. Check before you bid.
• Light and outlook. Multi-unit DAs in your block can permanently alter views, overshadowing and street parking. The application is public; the impact isn't in the vendor statement.
• Renovation precedent. If 20 nearby properties have approved renovations, your council is already familiar with character-zone arguments for that street. Easier path for your own.
• Resale story. A suburb being actively subdivided is a suburb whose streetscape is in flux. Buyers in three years will see something different from what you saw at inspection.

Methodology

• Source: Brisbane City Council development.i portal. PXR's `development_applications` table holds 118,197 BCC DAs going back to 2004 with 6,845 lodged in the last 12 months.
• Window: applications with `lodged_date` between 22 May 2024 and 20 May 2026.
• Category filter: included new houses (dwelling_house), subdivisions, multi-unit (multi_dwelling), renovations, commercial (retail, warehouse, office, shopping_centre, medical, school, social_housing). Excluded compliance, design siting, earthworks and park/recreation because they do not change streetscape.
• Street and suburb extraction: text pattern matching on the council-supplied address. About 89 percent of addresses match cleanly; the remaining 11 percent (mostly unusual address formats) fall out of the street and suburb tables.

Run your own address

Property X-Ray's address search shows every DA lodged within 500 metres of any Brisbane property, with the proposal text, the category and the decision status. Search before you bid, not after.

For an example of how DA history reads against a specific BCC suburb, our Boondall deep dive covers a North Brisbane suburb where the price line, the school catchment and the flood overlay all interact differently with the development-application pipeline. For the wider Brisbane picture, see which streets carry the worst flood risk and the suburbs where recorded crime is falling, or browse all our Queensland suburb research.

This piece counts streets. If you want the same pipeline counted by suburb instead, with the rankings rerun on primary applications only and again per square kilometre, see every development application in Brisbane ranked by suburb.