Highfields, Kleinton see $105m in construction amid Toowoomba region property boom

Two communities just outside Toowoomba have seen $105m in construction over the past 12 months — and it’s fuelling a property and construction boom worth nearly $600m.

Nadine and Luke Richards with their sons Riley (left) and Charlie. The Richards family live in Kleinton. Picture: Nev Madsen.

When Nadine and Luke Richards took advantage of the HomeBuilder grant to secure a greenfields site in Kleinton, they soon realised how fast-growing their new community was becoming.

The former Meringandan couple’s new home in Clive Berghofer’s estate is part of a massive housing boom over the past year, with $105m in works occurring across Highfields and Kleinton.

The figures, collated by the Toowoomba Regional Council based on data returned by building certifiers, are being driven primarily by new detached dwellings ($81m) fuelled by the popularity of the HomeBuilder scheme.

While the couple moved quickly to take advantage of the grant in late 2020, they said it wasn’t long before others followed.

“We got onto it straightaway, the grant was announced before we bought the land and we got in not long before the cut-off,” Mr Richards said.

“After a few months, everything in the construction industry was getting harder (to source),” Ms Richards added.

“It’s insane, when we were renting and we’d come down, just to see the new things coming up frequently was incredible.”

The building figures in Highfields and Kleinton completely dwarf every other community in the region, with Kearneys Spring ($24.8m), Harlaxton ($25m) and Middle Ridge ($24.4m) the next-closest suburbs.

In fact, the two areas represent 17 per cent of all building works ($592.4m) recorded by the council over the past 12 month.

Clive Berghofer Land Sales manager Lynne Lamb, who sold the Richards’ their greenfields site in Highfields North estate, said developers could barely keep up with the demand for housing north of Toowoomba.

“It has definitely been a boom, we did three stages that would’ve been eligible for that grant,” she said.

“We had just completed stage eight, and then HomeBuilder hit while we were selling it.

“I had about a third of the lots with names on them — we sold the rest of them the weekend the scheme hit.

“We wouldn’t have done nine and 10 as fast as we did, we got Hutchinson Builders back to finish them.”

But this demand hasn’t been without its drawbacks, with Ms Lamb acknowledging the strain it was putting on the construction sector.

“We’re still hitting supply issues, there’s often a 32-week wait for concrete, and all prices are rising, including earthworks and cost of diesel,” she said.

“There have been plasterboard, garage door and front door shortages, not the mention a lack of the actual tradespeople.”

A council spokesman clarified that while the data provided was accurate to what was in the organisation’s records, private and building certifiers were not required to provide values for commercial or industrial projects.

TOOWOOMBA CONSTRUCTION STATS (Past 12 months)

1. Highfields - $85.7m ($64.4m in residential)

2. Harlaxton - $25.2m ($2.4m in residential)

3. Kearneys Spring - $24.8m ($18.7m in residential)

4. Middle Ridge - $24.4m ($14.9m in residential)

5. Kleinton - $20.4m ($18.3m in residential)

6. Toowoomba City - $20.5m ($2m in residential)