Craig Stack is a long time Townsville businessman who has contributed on a number of levels including as president of the Chamber of Commerce.

As a partner in Knight Frank, Craig has an eye on the bellweather property industry which he’ll be reporting from in regular blogs for iQ Industry Queensland.

In this first contribution, Craig notes how well regional Queensland has managed the pandemic restrictions to keep trading and maintain employment.

If politicians and Chief Medical Officers could write a playbook regarding how communities should communicate and collaborate during a global pandemic, then Regional Queensland must be the model.

Very few communities, nationally and internationally, have been able to transact goods, workforces, and goodwill so consistently and efficiently across invisible regional borders without impact.

The fact that we have workforces flying and driving into areas such as the Bowen Basin and the North West Minerals Province and the exports we grow or mine in rural areas are transported to coastal ports, means we have an incredibly intimate interaction between regions.

Some of the following observations of interactions and market activity reflect that our regions have done it well.

At Knight Frank, we work with landlords from Gladstone to Cairns and more than 300 tenants, mostly small businesses.

The past four months have been genuinely uplifting as nearly every tenant has been innovative and tenacious in the way they have tried to maintain income and every landlord has respected that effort with support where needed.

So now we have property owners with a better understanding of their tenant’s businesses and tenants with greater confidence that they are not alone in this. All of these businesses continue to trade or have re-opened for trade.

Even in the wider North and Central Queensland communities, residential rental levels are holding in most cities and towns and in fact, residential occupancies are stronger than they were across the regions in 2018/2019.

Residential property values are being maintained in both the bigger cities and smaller towns and new housing starts from now until the end of December will be the strongest we have seen in a nearly a decade.

In each previous downturn, the statistics we needed to watch were the employment statistics and when Government assistance ends later this year, enhancing employment in our regions must be our collective focus.

The current unemployment data reflects where we were in May and is under-reported due to JobKeeper and the influence of casual employment.

The good news is this though – in every region in Central and North Queensland, Seek job ads are as strong in July as they were in January, pre-covid.

Our regions are in a more comfortable position than anywhere else in Australia, despite the challenges we still encounter in some sectors such as tourism and hospitality.  

With heavily restricted travel it looks like North and Central Queenslanders need to holiday near home – damn!

As a business owner, I want the outlook presented to me in regional Queensland rather than the outlook that anywhere else can give me just now.