Industrial property in Salisbury, Brisbane — lease, sale & leaseback and build-to-suit

Local context

Why Salisbury is strategic

Salisbury's industrial character is no accident of zoning — it was deliberately created. In November 1941 the Commonwealth opened the Rocklea Munitions Works on land around Compo Road (now Evans Road), one of the largest construction projects undertaken in Queensland during the war. At its peak the complex employed thousands, producing millions of rounds of small-arms ammunition, with buildings camouflaged against aerial detection. From 1943 the site pivoted to overhauling aircraft engines for United States forces in the South-West Pacific. That wartime industrial scale gave Salisbury a head start that shaped everything that followed.

After the war, the munitions estate was converted into the Salisbury Industrial Estate, forming the nucleus of Brisbane's southside industrial precinct. The surrounding street grid — Assembly, Chrome, Commerce, Engineering, Evans, Industries and Precision Streets — still carries the imprint of that planned industrial origin. Through the 1950s and 1960s the suburb grew rapidly around this base. Unlike precincts that grew piecemeal, Salisbury was engineered as an industrial place, and that intentionality remains legible in its layout and deep lot stock today.

Salisbury's contemporary economy is anchored by genuine manufacturing rather than pure distribution. Orrcon Steel operates a significant steel manufacturing and distribution mill at 121 Evans Road, producing structural tube, precision tube and line pipe for construction, mining and infrastructure markets and employing on the order of 160 people directly. The Evans Road spine more broadly hosts an eclectic working mix — engineering and fabrication workshops, food production and cold-room facilities, trade suppliers, and warehouses with showroom frontage. This is a suburb where things are still made, which gives its industrial base a depth that distribution-only locations lack.

Salisbury also illustrates the corridor's evolution. Parts of the heritage-listed munitions complex along Evans Road have been repurposed into a celebrated Ammunition Factory precinct — most visibly Ballistic Beer Co, which brews inside a former wartime munitions warehouse, alongside cafes and makers occupying the old sheds. At the same time, the Nathan, Salisbury, Moorooka Neighbourhood Plan, adopted by Brisbane City Council in May 2025, has refined zoning and industry provisions. The result is a nuanced suburb where heritage industrial fabric, active manufacturing and adaptive reuse coexist — and where well-located industrial land near the CBD remains genuinely scarce.

Typical asset types here

Heavy and light manufacturing facilities, steel and metal fabrication mills, engineering and machining workshops, food production and cold-room premises, trade-supply warehouses with showroom frontage, and adaptively reused heritage industrial buildings. Lot stock skews to established, deep sites within a planned post-war grid, with limited greenfield opportunity.

What drives demand

• CBD proximity — around 12 kilometres south of the GPO, supporting city-fringe manufacturing, trade supply and last-mile uses.
• Manufacturing depth — an entrenched base of steel, engineering, fabrication and food-production operators creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem.
• Rail and arterial access — the Beenleigh line runs through the suburb, with ready connections to Beaudesert Road, the Ipswich Motorway and the wider network.
• Scarcity of infill industrial land — hemmed by residential Moorooka, Tarragindi and Nathan, with little new supply.
• Heritage-led amenity and renewal — the Ammunition Factory precinct lifting the area's profile without displacing its core industrial function.