Industrial property — Port of Brisbane & Trade Coast, Brisbane

The corridor

Why this corridor matters

The Australia TradeCoast is one of the most consequential pieces of industrial geography in Australia. Wrapped around the lower Brisbane River where it meets Moreton Bay, it brings a deep-water container port, an international airport and the Gateway Motorway into a single contiguous logistics ecosystem. The numbers frame the scale: roughly 1,500 businesses, more than 60,000 employees, and a development pipeline historically targeting 1,300 hectares of trade-enabled land. It ranks as the second-largest business precinct in Queensland after the Brisbane CBD — but unlike the CBD, its purpose is the physical movement and handling of goods.

The Port of Brisbane is the corridor's engine. Operating from reclaimed land at Fisherman Islands, it is Queensland's largest container and multi-cargo port, handling a record 1.62 million TEU and around 34.9 million tonnes of total trade in FY25. Its supply chain contributes in the order of $11 billion to Gross State Product. Critically, the port is not finished growing: the 224-hectare Future Port Expansion — one of the Southern Hemisphere's largest reclamation undertakings — is progressively adding land and quayline to absorb container trade forecast to rise sharply over coming decades. Every additional box that crosses the wharf deepens demand for warehousing within a short truck cycle of the gate.

Movement defines the corridor, and the Gateway Motorway is its spine. The M1 Gateway and the twin Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges carry freight north to the airport and Bruce Highway and south to the Logan and Pacific Motorways and the national network. Today roughly 98 per cent of containers move through the port by road, which keeps a premium on land within minutes of an on-ramp. The longer-term story is rail: planning is advancing for a dedicated freight rail connection linking the port to Inland Rail at Acacia Ridge, a shift with the potential to take millions of truck movements off the network and reshape where intermodal value concentrates.

For a permanent-hold owner, the TradeCoast offers something rare — genuine, structural land scarcity beside irreplaceable infrastructure. The precinct has consistently recorded some of Brisbane's lowest industrial vacancy, at times near 3 per cent, and among its strongest prime rental growth. Englobo land is largely consumed; the canvas is now infill, brownfield renewal and build-to-suit on the few remaining super-lots. This is a market where assets are tightly held precisely because tenants cannot easily replicate the location — the defining characteristic Walter Taylor seeks in a long-term industrial holding.