A year into the job of running The Music Spot in Browns Plains, Hamish Carston is ecstatic with how business is going.
“Music seems to be something people got back into doing because they had time and disposable income that freed up a bit of money,” he said.
Mr Carston has seen the best and worst of business ownership in the last 18 months.
The music store has clearly benefitted from the pandemic, with higher than normal sales.
The same cannot be said for his other business, a cafe in north Brisbane, which he and his wife had to close because of Covid’s crippling influence.
Mr Carston is the second owner of The Music Spot in a proud 27-year history.
He hopes to set it up for another long haul, which would be a great achievement in the current climate for businesses in Browns Plains.
The Music Spot’s longevity is an anomaly in relation to national data on businesses, which suggests Browns Plains is a challenging environment to operate in.
Credit reporting agency CreditorWatch declared Browns Plains as a high risk area for insolvency – one of the five riskiest suburbs in Queensland to start up a business, according to its data.
“On a personal insolvency level, it’s the worst in Australia, the worst level that is,” CreditorWatch spokesperson Michael Pollack said.
On CreditWatch’s business risk index map, Browns Plains is covered with dark orange, indicating a high risk of insolvency.
The ranking assesses 300 regions in Australia, working on scale of zero to 100. Rankings near zero indicate high risks, while the close to 100 indicate less risk.
“You can see that Browns Plains with 2.4 is not a good result,” he said.
The lower rankings are caused by lower social advantages and lower measures of opportunity, which are reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Mr Pollack said.
Loganlea to Carbrook fared better with a ranking of 24.1, but still had above the national average for payment defaults, which happens when businesses do not pay each other for a service.
“One of the reasons for that is construction is one of the biggest industries in the area and that is notorious for payment defaults,” he said.
The data is supposed to help businesses make informed decisions about who they transact with and where businesses would perform well or poorly.
LJ Hooker Commercial’s director of sales and leasing, Kerry Armstrong, said the figures could be exaggerating the situation.
“To me, they are so often lopsided,” he said.
“They use a small sample from a certain area, and there’s often reasons why it might show up like that.”
For example, he said that businesses may have to close or relocate during a shopping centre renovation, which may not be reflected in the data.
“Browns Plains is no different to anywhere else,” he said.
“The way I see it is everything’s on the improve and whether it be Browns Plains or Slacks Creek, wherever it is in this South Queensland area, there’s a huge future and huge things happening in this strive towards the (2032 Olympic) Games.”
Now that business is starting to return to normal, he expects businesses to rebound well.
“When Covid was first announced, there was a lot of uncertainty around that, but as it stands now, most of the businesses have not only recovered, they are looking at doing extremely well,” he said.
