The Cairns Developer Quietly Reshaping How the City Does Business

Apex Commercial Group has leased every tenancy in its new Sheridan Street mixed-use development before the building received its certificate of occupancy. That's six ground-floor retail suites and four upper-level offices — roughly 1,840 square metres of net lettable area — all committed by mid-June 2026, more than three weeks before practical completion. The company's director, Marcus Tran, has been operating in the Cairns commercial market since 2018, but this is his firm's largest project to date and, by most accounts, the tightest pre-lease result the Cairns CBD has seen in at least four years.

The timing matters. Nationally, property sentiment is patchy at best. Residential first-home buyers are pulling back across Australia's capital cities as prices cool and mortgage anxiety lingers. Meanwhile, industrial land in Brisbane and Sydney is being quietly absorbed by AI datacentre operators, squeezing out freight and logistics tenants and pushing up rents. Cairns sits at a remove from those pressures — but not entirely immune. Commercial rents in the Cairns CBD have risen roughly 12 percent since January 2024, according to figures compiled by local agency Colliers Cairns, driven partly by constrained new supply and partly by a post-pandemic reconfiguration of how professional services firms want to use office space.

What Apex Got Right on Sheridan Street

Apex's approach on the Sheridan Street project — located between Aplin and Shields streets, a stretch that has seen steady foot traffic from the nearby Cairns Base Hospital precinct and the Reef Hotel Casino — was deliberately low-scale. Rather than chasing a single anchor tenant for a large floor plate, Tran's team subdivided the upper level into four suites ranging from 210 to 320 square metres, each with operable walls that allow further subdivision. Two of those suites are now occupied by health administration firms. A third went to a regional accounting practice relocating from older stock on Lake Street. The fourth is being fitted out by a Townsville-based engineering consultancy opening its first permanent Cairns office.

That tenant mix reflects a broader shift. The Cairns Chamber of Commerce flagged in its March 2026 quarterly survey that 61 percent of member businesses with more than 10 staff were actively reviewing their office footprint, with most leaning toward smaller, higher-quality space rather than cutting back entirely. Building services, healthcare administration, and professional consulting are each expanding in the region, partly driven by Commonwealth infrastructure spending on the Bruce Highway upgrade corridor and the ongoing Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility pipeline.

Asking rents for prime CBD office space in Cairns currently sit around $420 to $460 per square metre net, up from roughly $375 in early 2024. Secondary stock on Lake Street and McLeod Street is still trading in the $280 to $320 range, and vacancy in that tier has crept above 18 percent — a figure that underlines why tenants with options are gravitating toward new builds even at a premium.

What Comes Next for the Cairns Office Market

Apex Commercial Group has lodged a development application with Cairns Regional Council for a second project, a seven-storey commercial building on Grafton Street near the intersection with Spence Street. If approved, it would deliver approximately 3,200 square metres of net office space — the largest single commercial office addition to the Cairns CBD since the Cairns Corporate Tower expanded in 2019. A council decision is expected by September 2026.

For businesses currently hunting space in the city, the practical read is straightforward: good-quality stock is moving fast, and waiting for the right suite to open up carries real risk. Agents at Ray White Commercial Cairns and Knight Frank's local office both reported in June that average time-on-market for premium CBD offices had dropped to under 45 days — compared with 90-plus days through most of 2022 and 2023. Businesses with lease renewals coming up in the next 12 months should be opening conversations with landlords now, not at the six-month mark. Tran's Sheridan Street result makes the case better than any market report could.