A Quiet Current? Exploring a Possible Link Between SMSF Investment and Kurilpa’s Rapid Development
Walk along Montague Road or down by the river in West End in inner city Brisbane and it’s hard to miss the momentum. The cranes, concrete pumps and marketing banners tell a story of continuing confidence. Yet many in the wider Brisbane community see the Kurilpa peninsula as one of the city’s most flood-exposed areas.
After the 2022 floods, the scale of ongoing apartment construction raises an obvious question: who is buying all this new stock?
What triggered the thought
ASIC’s recent Report 824 – Review of SMSF Establishment Advice (November 2025) provides an interesting backdrop. The review found widespread problems with financial advice that steers people into Self-Managed Superannuation Funds (SMSFs) to buy off-the-plan property through limited-recourse borrowing arrangements (LRBAs).
Put simply, some advisers have been helping clients establish SMSFs mainly to purchase new apartments or townhouses — often using borrowed funds — under the banner of “take control of your super through property.” ASIC found that most of this advice failed to meet legal obligations and, in many cases, was likely to be detrimental to clients’ retirement outcomes.
Reading that, I wondered whether this mechanism might also be playing a role in places like Kurilpa where development remains strong despite clear statements that property buyers should exercise flood-related caution.
Why it might matter here
Kurilpa’s new projects could have features that make them technically suitable for SMSF borrowing:
Off-the-plan, single-contract purchases which is a structural requirement for an LRBA
New stock marketed with long-term rental projections and depreciation schedules
A story of “control” and “real asset security” that resonates with SMSF holders
If even a small proportion of buyers are SMSFs, this could add a layer of flood-insensitive demand that helps maintain feasibility for high-risk sites.
Because SMSF loans are limited-recourse, the lender’s exposure is capped at the value of the property, leaving most of the downside with the SMSF itself.
In addition, SMSF trustees are always absentee investors — they can’t occupy the property — and their connection to site-specific risks like flooding can be more abstract than that of owner-occupiers.
Combined with the long time horizon and the sheltered setting of superannuation, this can create a subtle sense that environmental risks are manageable or distant, even when they remain very real.
How one might know
There’s no direct data showing how many Kurilpa apartments are held in or marketed to SMSFs. Still, a few empirical signals could be examined:
Finance structures at settlement: proportion of LRBA or bare-trust loans in local sales data.
Marketing channels: use of private wealth or adviser networks rather than open listings.
Hold behaviour: low resale activity even as insurance costs rise, suggesting long-term super holdings.
Relative pricing: resilience of new-build prices in flood-affected zones versus comparable older stock.
Each would help test whether SMSF capital is a small curiosity or a meaningful factor in sustaining development momentum.
The broader point
None of this implies wrongdoing or a hidden agenda. It’s simply an invitation to connect two policy worlds that rarely meet — urban resilience and superannuation behaviour.
If tax-advantaged, long-horizon retirement capital is flowing into flood-exposed real estate, that could have implications for risk management, insurance markets and even future disaster recovery costs.
Kurilpa may therefore offer a useful case study: not a “gotcha” moment, but a live experiment in how financial incentives and urban form intersect. As ASIC’s report reminds us, advice and investment structures have real-world footprints. Sometimes those footprints are literally on the floodplain.
This piece draws on ASIC Report 824 (2025) Review of SMSF Establishment Advice as the starting point for reflection. It offers a hypothesis for further research rather than a conclusion.