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“You’re just getting more bang for your buck.”
That’s what builder Jay Flaskos attributes to the rise in knockdown rebuilds in Brisbane’s well-located and affluent suburbs.
“The cost of a full renovation, or a substantial renovation, is pretty high given the cost of construction at the moment,” he said.
“At the end of the day, it’s more feasible to knock a house down and start fresh.”
Increasingly, single houses in Brisbane’s sought-after inner- and middle-ring areas are being bulldozed to make way for new, much larger homes on the same site.
The suburbs with the highest proportion of knockdown rebuilds are those without character overlays and where weatherboard or fibro-cement postwar houses are primed for demolition, including Carina Heights, Windsor, Taringa, Upper Mount Gravatt, Mitchelton, Stafford Heights, Wavell Heights and Camp Hill.
For the first time last year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics examined approvals for knockdown rebuilds amid the national housing shortage.
In many cases, post-war houses on sizeable blocks are being flattened, and the land subdivided to build two new homes.
But the ABS found that 74 per cent of all houses in Queensland which are demolished are replaced by a single home.
“This highlights the fact that most knockdown rebuilds are not adding to overall housing stock, but instead are used as a means of significantly upgrading an existing detached dwelling,” the ABS said.
Brisbane needs an additional 209,000 new homes by the year 2046, by which time the city’s population is predicted to be 1.72 million people.
Flaskos’ company, Flascon Construction Group, builds between 20 and 30 new homes a year, nearly all of which are one-for-one knockdown rebuilds.
“People want to remain where they are, but capitalise on the value of their land,” he said.
Demolition of an existing home costs about $30,000 on average due to mounting waste levies, he said, and the budget for a custom, luxury new build begins at $1 million.
“The average price point for a new build I see in these suburbs is $1.5 million to $2.5 million,” Flaskos said.
Some, however, are double that.
Construction costs across Australia have soared since COVID, with the average cost to build a detached home in Queensland jumping by 40 per cent since 2021.
The war in Iran, which triggered a global spike in fuel prices, bumped up construction costs even further this year, in the order of $20,000 per dwelling.
When labour shortages and material delays are factored in, homeowners can expect to pay up to $4650 per square metre for a custom-built house in Brisbane.
Dr Rachel Gallagher, a lecturer in urban planning at Griffith University, understands people’s desire to upgrade their home, but remain within their community, as well as the challenge of finding the right house in a preferred area, or within a desired school zone.
“These post-war houses are potentially reaching their use-by date, and they’re needing substantial structural updates or reinforcement,” she said.
“People are attached to their suburb, they want to stay where they are, especially if there’s high land value, so it’s often more cost-effective to just knock them down.
“As much as I love a postmodern house, it is a house like any other, and they are not unique to Queensland, or to Brisbane.”
However, she said homeowners were often hamstrung by restrictive planning policies that prohibit building duplexes, or row houses, in Brisbane’s low-density residential areas.
“My question from a planning system issue is, ‘Why can you replace an existing home with such a large house that has got three garage spaces, but you can’t build a duplex, or a triplex?’
“When you replace an existing home with a McMansion you’re freezing that land for the next 30, 50, 100 years. It would be very, very wasteful to then knock that house down and build a duplex or build units.
“You can’t really blame the property owners, but you can perhaps blame a restrictive planning system that doesn’t allow more flexibility in those areas.”
Architect Sandy Cavill, whose transformation of New Farm’s heritage-listed Sydney House won Brisbane’s House of the Year in 2025, said he feared houses were being treated as disposable consumer products.
“Some rebuilding is inevitable as ageing housing stock reaches the end of its useful life, but Brisbane shouldn’t assume that bigger and newer automatically means better,” he said.
“The city is rightly protective of its traditional Queenslander homes, yet we’ve arguably overlooked an entire generation of mid-century housing that is often more durable, climatically responsive and adaptable than it’s given credit for.
“The most sustainable building is typically the one that’s already there. Ultimately, the architecture that endures is architecture that responds to Brisbane’s climate, landscape and way of life, rather than the latest design trend.”
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