By: William Jones
Two years ago, Craig McDermott made a decision that raised a few eyebrows among his peers. While most developers on Australia’s east coast were still competing for sites in Brisbane’s overheated corridors and the Sunshine Coast’s well-trodden pockets, Craig McDermott turned his attention west to Toowoomba.
Not the Toowoomba of old, the country town that city-dwellers passed through on the way to the Darling Downs. The Toowoomba of now: a small city of over 130,000 people with an international airport, a $2.5 billion hospital under construction, and a post-pandemic migration trend that has seen thousands of young professionals return home to start families.
“A lot of people still think of Toowoomba as a country town,” McDermott said. “It hasn’t been that for a long time. There’s a Westfield, there are major private schools, there’s an international airport that the Wagner family built on their own land. When you actually look at the data, the growth story is becoming increasingly evident.”
The data backs him up. The Toowoomba region’s population is projected to reach 225,000 by 2046, supported by the Inland Rail Project, Wellcamp Airport’s continued expansion as a freight hub, and the new Toowoomba Hospital at Baillie Henderson, one of the largest health infrastructure projects in regional Queensland’s history.
McDermott didn’t just study the market; he moved on it quickly.
Within six months of his initial search, CJAM Group had secured a 168-lot site in the Toowoomba region. Over the following twelve months, two more projects were locked in: Havenwood on Highfields, a 39-home community in one of the region’s most liveable suburbs, and Rise at Middle Ridge, a 58-home architecturally designed development in Toowoomba’s premium blue-chip postcode.
Then came the move that suggested CJAM Group’s ambitions extended well beyond a single corridor.
Glasshouse Residences, a 134-dwelling mixed-use development in Beerwah on the Sunshine Coast, gave McDermott a foothold in a second high-growth region, and introduced something relatively unique among Queensland developers: purpose-built NDIS-compliant housing as part of a residential community, not as a standalone product.
“We’re not a volume builder looking to pump out cookie-cutter houses,” McDermott said. “Every project we do is designed around the specific market it sits in. Havenwood is about community and affordability. Rise is about premium design in a blue-chip suburb. Glasshouse is about mixed-use and meeting the demand that no one else is building for, including NDIS.”
What ties all three projects together is CJAM Group’s construction methodology. McDermott builds homes off-site using a modular system, with sections manufactured in 3.6-metre-wide modules and transported to the site on semi-trailers. A four-bedroom house comprises three modules, which can be configured and expanded to create five-bedroom homes or additional multi-purpose rooms. The result is substantially faster build times and more precise quality control.
“We don’t sell blocks of land,” McDermott said. “We build the house, we do the landscaping, we deliver a finished product. The buyer gets the keys and moves in.”
The approach is working. At Havenwood on Highfields, 21 of 39 homes were sold before the project even received council approval. At Rise at Middle Ridge, two homes sold in the first week of release. The strong early uptake reflects both the market appetite and the product-market fit that McDermott has calibrated across his developments.
Behind the speed and the sales numbers, there’s a thesis that McDermott has been testing for two years and now feels more confident in: regional Queensland is where the growth is.
The vacancy rate across the Toowoomba region sits below 1%. Middle Ridge posted 16.1% price growth in the last twelve months. On the Sunshine Coast, the government is investing $2.75 billion in a rail project that starts in Beerwah, the very suburb where Glasshouse Residences is being built. And the 2032 Brisbane Olympics will likely drive further infrastructure development across South East Queensland for the next six years.
“The old playbook was: build in Brisbane and hope for the best,” McDermott said. “The new playbook is: go where the infrastructure money is going, go where the people are moving, and build what the market actually needs. That’s Toowoomba. That’s the Sunshine Coast. And we’re just getting started.”
With over 200 dwellings now in his active pipeline across two regions and multiple product types, from turnkey family homes to architecturally designed boutique residences to NDIS-compliant apartments, Craig McDermott is quietly building one of the more diversified regional development portfolios in Queensland.
The eyebrows that were raised two years ago? They’ve begun to nod in agreement.
