Surging population growth is creating housing construction hotspots in the suburban outskirts of Australia’s major capital cities. The annual Housing Industry Association Population and Residential Building Hotspots Report says the northwest Sydney suburbs of Box Hill and Nelson are Australia’s biggest hotspots for construction, followed by Fraser Rise and Plumpton in Melbourne’s west.

There are 11 Victorian locations on the Top 20 list, many of them in the growing outer suburbs.
New South Wales has four home-building hotspots in the top 20, including Marsden Park and Austral.
Queensland has three, Chambers Flat – Logan Reserve, Ripley and Caloundra West and both Western Australia and South Australia have one each.

The HIA identified hotspots as areas where population growth eclipses the national rate of 2.4% and building work is worth more than $200 million. HIA economist Maurice Tapang says the results show that new master-planned housing communities are in high demand.

“The drivers of housing demand are population and economic growth,” he says. “Supporting population growth will require supplying adequate homes, which will entail providing the necessary infrastructure and land supply to grow our cities.”