Most families who relocate to Brisbane make the decision quickly and then spend months trying to catch up on everything they don't know about the city.
That's the honest position. You've accepted a role, or you've decided the trade is worth making, and now you need to buy a home in a market you can't drive around on a Saturday. The listings all look reasonable. The photographs are good. The suburb names mean very little. And every flight up costs you a weekend and a few thousand dollars, which buys you six inspections if the timing works and three if it doesn't.
We represent buyers only, and a large part of our work is for families in exactly this position. Here's what we've learned matters.
The things a listing will never tell you
A photograph will show you a renovated kitchen. It won't tell you the house sits at the bottom of a gully and takes overland flow in heavy rain. It won't tell you the arterial road two streets across carries traffic from 5am. It won't tell you the primary school catchment line runs through the middle of the street, and the side you're looking at feeds into a different school from the one you researched.
Brisbane has four separate flood sources, river, creek, overland flow and storm tide, and a property can be exposed to one, some or none of them. Brisbane City Council publishes a FloodWise Property Report for any address, which is the starting point, not the finish. Two houses on the same street can sit very differently.
Then there's the housing stock. A lot of Brisbane's inner and middle-ring housing is pre-war timber, often raised, often altered over decades by owners rather than builders. Some of it sits inside the Traditional Building Character Overlay, which applies to areas with a cohesive pre-1947 character and restricts what you can demolish. That matters enormously if your plan involves knocking down and starting again, and buyers from other states routinely don't know it exists until after they've bought.