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The Conus Trend series for Cairns SA4 building approvals fell to 96 in May, down 21.6% year-on-year and the lowest monthly reading since November 2024. Last month’s April read has also been revised, down to 101 from the 104 first reported. As flagged previously, the series is still working through the 468 Woree unit approvals booked in July 2025; stripping that block out lifts the adjusted May Trend to a steadier 105, still down 1.3% on a year ago.
What makes this a Cairns story rather than a national one is the comparison against the rest of the state. Trend approvals are running +13.6% year-on-year across Queensland and +8.8% nationally over the same period. Of the state’s 19 SA4 regions, 11 have Trend approvals rising. Cairns is one of only eight where they are falling, and just three of those eight are falling faster.
The decline matters because of where it is landing. At current levels, monthly Trend approvals have fallen back to where they sat in 2015-16, a period when the SA4’s population was growing by roughly 2,500 people a year. Cairns is now adding more than 3,500 people annually. On an average household size of about 2.5 people per dwelling, that extra 1,000 people a year requires roughly 400 more dwellings than a decade ago, or about 33 more approvals a month than we are currently tracking.
That gap is opening up on top of a rental market that has had a vacancy rate rarely above 1% for five years and median rents up more than 50% over the same period. Bringing monthly approvals back in line with underlying population growth would need something in the order of a 35% lift from here, not a return to trend. Given the regional comparison above, that is a Cairns-specific gap for Council, State Government and the construction sector to close, not one that will fix itself as financing conditions ease elsewhere.
We are proud to have CBC Staff Selection as supporters of the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend Employment and Jobseeker data series