Rentvesting in Queensland: What It Actually Costs

You rent a home in the suburb you want to live in. You buy somewhere your budget actually reaches, and a tenant pays that loan down while you stay put. That's rentvesting. Most people meet the idea through a bank explainer that never puts a Queensland figure on any of it.

The cost is a tax one, and it's worth knowing before anything else. The ATO says a main residence is exempt from capital gains tax if you're an Australian resident and the dwelling meets all of these.

Miss one and you may still be entitled to a partial exemption. That's the ATO's own wording, and it's the part the short explainers drop.

Then there's the six-year rule, which is the honest other half of it. The ATO says a property can keep being treated as your main residence for up to six years while it earns rent, and indefinitely while it doesn't. The catch is order. It has to have been your main residence first, so the rule can't reach back to a period before you moved in. You also can't treat another property as your main residence at the same time, except for up to six months while you're moving house. Both ATO pages were last updated 22 June 2026.

FAA's investment calculator is a model with its assumptions written into the file, and you can open the tool and change every one of them. Below is what it does on the figures it ships with, computed 25 August 2026.

Read the 8.8 per cent carefully. That's the reference default the engine mirrors from the Connekt tool it was built against. It isn't FAA's management fee, and we don't publish ours on this page. Nothing in the table below is an offer, a quote, a market average or a figure any particular property will produce. It's one set of inputs, chosen so the model lines up with the live tool.

Run those inputs and year one comes out like this. The loan is $816,198 because the acquisition costs are capitalised into it and the deposit is zero. Rent of $40,040 against interest of $51,420, cash operating costs of $12,024 (of which $3,524 is the management fee) and depreciation of $21,629. That's a taxable property loss of $45,033, which returns $14,410 across the two owners, and leaves an after-tax cost of $8,994 for the year. Divide by 52 and it's $172.95 a week.

What the model doesn't do matters as much. It books 52 weeks of rent, so there's no vacancy in it at all. The zero deposit is a modelling convention and it puts the loan at 101.89 per cent of the property value, which is more than a lender will write. The tax brackets are labelled ATO resident 2024-25 and 2025-26 with offsets ignored, so read the tax lines as an illustration and check your own year. Depreciation is the engine's own estimate. A quantity surveyor would put a schedule in front of you with a different figure on it. Move the rent, the interest rate, the deposit or the property itself and every figure above changes.

Rent is the other half of the sum, and Queensland publishes it. The RTA holds every rental bond in the state. Its median is the weekly rent on new tenancies starting in the quarter, so it tracks what fresh tenants agreed to pay. Sitting tenants sit outside it. The RTA's own guidance is to compare year on year, so the movements below are against June 2025.

Statewide, the median across all dwellings was $650 a week in the June quarter of 2026, up from $600 a year earlier. A three-bedroom house was $630 against $595. A four-bedroom house was $725 against $690. Where you rent moves that a long way.

The spread between the dearest and cheapest council areas is $320 a week, Noosa against Toowoomba. Between the Sunshine Coast and Ipswich it's $150. That's smaller than the purchase price gap the whole strategy is built on, and we're not putting a dollar figure on the price side here, because this page carries no verified Queensland median sale price. Our Sunshine Coast page carries REIQ medians if you want one.

Put both sides together and the shape of it shows up. Rent on the Sunshine Coast at the RTA's June 2026 quarter median of $750 a week, hold the property FAA's model uses as its default, and the weekly housing cost lands near $923. That's $750 of market median rent from the RTA plus $172.95 of after-tax holding cost from our own model, computed 25 August 2026. Two figures measured in completely different ways, added together to show the shape of the cost. Not a prediction of yours.

On 25 August 2026 FAA's live listing store held 13 current managed rentals across 13 Queensland suburbs, advertised between $330 and $820 a week. Coastal and growth corridor, in roughly equal measure. Those suburb names below are the source of a rent figure and nothing more.

Six of the 13 go into a four-bedroom house comparison. They run from $625 to $820 a week, and the middle of them sits at $715. The RTA's Queensland median for a four-bedroom house in the June quarter of 2026 was $725, so the two land $10 apart. Read that as a cross-check on a small sample. Six houses advertised on one day out of our feed sit beside every new four-bedroom house bond lodged across the state in a quarter, and only one of those two is a count of the whole market.

A seventh could belong in that group and we left it out anyway. The Maroochydore listing carries four bedrooms in the feed's structured field while its own description says three, and we can't settle that from here. It stays out of the average until someone walks the house and tells us which is right.

Two more listings sit outside the comparison, and both belong out in the open. The Sippy Downs listing at $330 is shared accommodation with fully furnished rooms. The Kallangur listing at $450 is a one-bedroom. Quoting either next to a family home rent would be a comparison we invented.

The feed is a floor. It only ever shows what's vacant, so every tenanted property we look after is invisible to it. It syncs every 15 minutes, so these figures move while you read them. FAA Property manages residential investment property across the Sunshine Coast from the single Maroochydore office, and sources new-build, house-and-land and off-market investment property across South East Queensland.

It's the question people actually type, so start with the obvious answer. You're paying rent and a loan at the same time, and only one of those two is building you anything. The rent you pay on your own home isn't deductible either. The ATO's deduction rule covers interest on a loan used to buy a rental property while it's rented or held to produce assessable income, and it excludes any period the property is used privately. Nothing in that reaches the rent you pay your own landlord.

The less obvious answer is that every model flatters this strategy, ours included, and you can see it by pulling the flattering parts out. Swap the new build for an established property and the depreciation goes to zero, which moves the weekly cost from $172.95 to $306.05. Take the tax offset out altogether and it's $450.08 a week. The gap between the first of those and the last is $277.12 a week, which is the $14,410 the model returns in year one spread across 52 weeks.

That offset survives the 2026 change, and a page telling you it disappears has it wrong. In the second reading speech on 28 May 2026, the Treasurer said losses on an existing residential investment property bought after the announcement "will only be deductible against other income from residential properties, including capital gains", and that "excess losses can be carried forward to offset residential property income in future years". Deferred, then.

One thing belongs right next to that arithmetic. The model's default property is a new build, which is exactly the category the 2027 rule carves out, and FAA is paid by builders and developers when a purchase proceeds. The strategy session costs you nothing for the same reason. Read every figure above knowing where the money sits.

This is where rentvesting genuinely costs a Queensland first home buyer, and it's also where the popular summary flattens something important. Start with what an owner-occupier first home buyer can claim, straight from the Queensland Revenue Office.

Buy a rental you never live in and the duty concessions are gone, because both of them turn on whether you've held an interest in a residence anywhere in Australia or overseas. Owning the rental means you've held one. The grant asks a different question. QRO's published criteria say you're not eligible for the grant if you or your spouse owned residential property in Australia on or after 1 July 2000 that you lived in, or any residential property before 1 July 2000. A property you only ever rented out doesn't meet the lived-in test.

QRO says the same thing on its grant page. If you've owned an interest in residential property since 1 July 2000 used solely for investment, you may be eligible for the grant on a later new property that will be your first home to live in. You'd have to show you never lived in it, with evidence covering the entire period of ownership: tenancy or lease agreements, electricity or phone accounts, and tax return details declaring the rental property. QRO also states you can rent the home out before moving in and keep the grant, but you may lose the first home concession.

Read all of that as QRO's published criteria and nothing further. The Commissioner of State Revenue decides eligibility, and an agent's opinion carries no weight there, ours included. The transfer duty first home concession is still lost. This page sets out published rules and stops there, so it says nothing about anyone's own position, and FAA can't secure or assess a grant or concession for you.

Two sentences, because three other pages here already carry the detail. The ATO says the reform announced on 12 May 2026 is now law, and that from 1 July 2027 it limits negative gearing for residential property investments to new builds. On the same page, updated 29 June 2026, it says properties held at announcement, 7:30pm AEST on 12 May 2026, are exempt from the negative gearing changes.

What counts as a new build isn't settled, so we won't tell you which properties will qualify. Our negative gearing page carries the Act and the consultation still open on that definition. The negative gearing calculator runs a position out year by year. The strategy page sets rentvesting against the other approaches investors use.

Who pays us, before anything else, because it should change how you read the arithmetic above. Builders and developers pay FAA a commission when a purchase proceeds. The strategy session costs you nothing for exactly that reason. Weigh what we put in front of you with that in mind, and check any property against your own figures.

FAA Property Pty Ltd is a licensed Queensland real estate agency, Office of Fair Trading licence 4220395, current to 5 June 2027. One office, in Maroochydore, and no branch anywhere else. We manage residential investment property across the Sunshine Coast from it, and we source new-build, house-and-land and off-market investment property across South East Queensland. There were 61 Google reviews (read 2026-08-15) on the business profile.

Now the honest limit of this page. A model built on one set of assumptions can't tell you whether rentvesting suits you, and it isn't trying to. Change the rent, the rate, the deposit or the property and every figure here moves. What we'll do is sit down and run your actual numbers. Whether the tax outcome works for your position is a question for your accountant, and we're not licensed to answer it.