Young families are driving population growth on the Gold Coast

Young families seeking affordable housing and a warm climate are driving population growth in Queensland’s beautiful Gold Coast region.

As the Gold Coast prepares for the 2018 Commonwealth Games, it is estimated about 10,000 people will settle in the city each year, taking the population from 524,000 to 580,000 by 2018

The suburbs of Coomera, Pacific Pines, Pimpama, and Oxenford have attracted the majority of young couples with young children moving to the city, according to a demographer.

The fastest growing demographic on the Gold Coast in the last decade has been 25-29-year-olds, while the second fastest growing demographic has been 0-4-year-olds.

It's not the Gold Coast that the tourists know that's growing, it's the entire coastal corridor between the NSW boarder and Brisbane

Despite being among the fastest growing cities in Australia, the Gold Coast has weathered four consecutive years of falling property prices, with discretionary spending and individual wealth eroded in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Values in the region's prestige market were hit hardest, falling as much as 50 per cent in some cases; However, the prolonged downturn has earned the Gold Coast's fringe suburbs a reputation as ideal places for young families to take their first step onto the property ladder.

The growth is in the family suburbs, which is more an extension of the outer Brisbane suburbs and as a result we're seeing a lot of commuting to Brisbane from these suburbs.

In the past decade, the Gold Coast has attracted as many as 15,000 new residents each year and of those, nearly 11,000 come from NSW, and in particular the Sutherland Shire, Hills Shire, Blacktown, Warringah and Penrith areas of Sydney and there's no evidence of that trend changing.

Affordability was a key factor with the median house price in the Sutherland Shire being $725,000 at the end of last financial year, while on the Gold Coast it was $465,000

Demographer Bernard Salt said he saw the Games as a "break point" for the Gold Coast and in many respects the Games is a signal to the end of a period of great hardship on the Gold Coast. It's a decade after the GFC and it's probably about the time in the cycle when the Gold Coast needs to regroup and surge again.

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