Adelaide and Perth could hardly be more different. But they share a single, defining feature: supply cannot keep pace with demand.

Consider the scoreboard. Adelaide’s rental vacancy sits at just 0.7%. Perth’s industrial vacancy, at 1.8%, is among the tightest in the country. On current consumption, Adelaide has roughly one to two years of industrial land left; Perth, two to three. In South Australia alone, the shortfall runs to almost 3,000 hectares against forecast demand to 2051.

Scarcity like that doesn’t stay hidden — it shows up in price. Adelaide greenfield land is up 23% in a year, and 131% since 2021, the sharpest rise of any capital. In Perth, land costs have climbed 66% in four years.

We don’t read these numbers in isolation. Together they describe a structural imbalance between what a market needs and what it can deliver — and that imbalance is exactly where both opportunity and risk live.

What gives us conviction is what sits behind the demand.

In Adelaide, a defence pipeline measured in the tens of billions — $45bn of frigates, around $30bn of submarine construction — is laying down decades of economic activity. In Perth, resources and energy keep doing the heavy lifting, from a ~$55bn renewable energy hub to LNG. In a single year, Western Australia added more than 97,000 people. Supply still hasn’t caught up.

None of this is a twelve-month story. Both pipelines extend well into the next decade.

For a financier, that time horizon is everything. We are not in the business of chasing momentum. We want to understand what will hold a market up over the life of a loan — and what happens to it if conditions turn. That is the work.

I hope this Outlook does more than add another set of statistics to the pile. I hope it shows how we think: how we weigh a market, how we price risk, and how much sits behind a decision before we back it.

Because in the end, we don’t lend against a headline. We lend against the fundamentals — and right now, in these two markets, they are hard to ignore.