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The ABS small area building approvals data for August landed on 7 October. On our Trend series, Cairns SA4 approvals ran at 111 dwellings in August, down 19.0% on a year earlier. Over the same period the Queensland Trend rose 18.2% and the national Trend rose 9.1%.
Cairns is 17th of the 19 Queensland SA4s, level with Wide Bay, with Townsville last at -23.7%. Seven regions are below where they were a year ago, and five of those seven are outside Greater Brisbane. Greater Brisbane is up 31.8%; the rest of Queensland is up 2.3%. The state’s building recovery is still almost entirely a south-east one.
The 468 unit approval at Woree in July 2025 still sits in the year-earlier Trend, which exaggerates the size of the fall. With Woree taken out, our separately calculated Cairns adjusted-Trend is down 9.1%. That figure is not scaled to the Queensland total, so it should not be set against the 18.2%, but it does confirm the direction.
The cleaner way to see it is Cairns’ share of the state. Cairns now accounts for 2.5% of Queensland’s Trend approvals, down from 3.9% in May 2025. That share has fallen every month for 15 months and is the lowest since August 2016. In original terms Cairns approved 89 dwellings in August, every one of them a house.
The Cairns Trend fell 0.9% in August. The question is still whether the south-east boom reaches the Far North at all, and on this release there is no sign of it.
We are proud to have CBC Staff Selection as supporters of the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend Employment and Jobseeker data series