22 Sep 2025
Words Trudy Crooks Informer

Introducing RB Research’s first ever Motel Report

For On the Market this issue, I’ve been on the road! My team and I have been on a roadshow to launch RB Research’s inaugural Motel Report.

We took in eight cities, starting off in Brisbane, then Port Macquarie, Newcastle, Orange, Melbourne, Wodonga and Cairns, before finishing up in Sydney 12 days later!

The reception and turnout was phenomenal wherever we went.

We’re very proud of this report. It’s the first time a comprehensive, data-driven analysis of the Australian motel sector has been undertaken.

My great thanks to the report’s principal author, our one and only Josh Mangleson, always the smartest man in the room, who’s headed RB Research since its inception in 2021.

Motel Report 2025 gives the industry its first ever selfie, including an idea of its size. Until now, the scale of the motel sector in terms of asset value has been largely guesswork. Now, to a very high degree of quantifiability, we know the sector’s value is over $15 billion.

ResortBrokers feels we’re in a good position to analyse the industry. Thanks to our great clients, we enjoy the lion’s share of motel sales across the country — eight times more than our competitors sell on average — and we’re the only specialist accommodation property agency with our own inhouse research department.

Motel Report 2025 was conceived three years ago and is the culmination of over six months’ painstaking data collection and analysis by RB Research. We have no problem claiming the motel sales database amassed by RB Research is without equal in the industry. It draws on thousands of motel transactions across Australia, sourced from ResortBrokers and data provided external valuers: Opteon, Acumentis Property Valuers and Knight Frank Valuations.

Our great thanks to them all. Without their involvement, the comprehensive scope and depth envisioned for this report simply couldn’t have been realised.

About a month before we launched the report, I was interviewed by the Australian Financial Review for a motel sector outlook. The Fin described the resurgence of motels as a “Cinderella story.” A catchy headline no doubt, but nonetheless right on the money.

As I told the Fin, the number of motel sales ResortBrokers transacted increased around 60% compared to pre-Covid, while the average number of enquiries per motel listing has increased by close to 130% over the same time.

Demand is clearly outstripping supply as buyers re-appreciate motels as a great asset class that provide affordable entry points into the accommodation industry, a business plus a home, and, increasingly, solid capital growth. Traditionally, motels mostly appealed to buyers for their cashflow, but these days buyers of motel freeholds are also drawn by their capital growth potential.

For ResortBrokers as an agency, some of the report’s findings have been reassuring.

As many of you will know, ResortBrokers pioneered the motel leasehold concept in our early days in the mid-1980s.

“Demand is outstripping
supply as buyers
re-appreciate
motels as a great
asset class.”

It’s encouraging for us, and a great sign of the sustainability of the leasehold model, that the metrics we applied when we first popularised the leasehold concept have stood the test of time. As Motel Report 2025 shows, rents still sit in the range of 45% of adjusted net profit, a percentage we’ve used as a rule of thumb for 40 years.

In Queensland, where we first started to promote the leasehold concept, motel leases hold the best value on the eastern seaboard with a median yield of 35.6% compared to 32.3% for New South Wales and 29.2% for Victoria.

Motel Report 2025 also bears out ResortBrokers’ long-held belief: “Coast for show, inland for dough.” As the report shows, over the last decade regional freehold going concern motels have enjoyed the greatest growth at an incredible 154%. Bang for buck, regional freeholds are the best value, cheaper than state capitals and coastal locations. Regional freehold passives outperform their coastal counterparts by 20%.

Motel Report 2025 is the first in what we plan to be an annual report. There’s much more in the report than the broad brushstrokes I’ve given here, so I really encourage all industry stakeholders — motel operators, landlords, valuers, industry bodies and investors — to read the report, which you can download for free by scanning the QR code. END