Property is a dual good. It provides both a variety of housing services and, sometimes, investment returns. Premiums are paid for a complex bundle of relative advantages, risks, and opportunities within idiosyncratic, complex, and evolving metropolis. Factors beyond the urban footprint influence the pace of innovation and urban evolution. Housing markets respond imperfectly to policy, resource endowments, and institutional arrangements. Privilege and prospects mutate in turbulent, resource-constrained, but increasingly knowledge-driven economies. Notwithstanding the hierarchy of influences, excessive premiums signal urban stress, if not disease, in the broader planning and social debate. With the general significance of premium clarified, the research question of the project becomes: ‘What drives residential property price premium evolution in a metropolis?’ A complete answer involves establishing the nature and location of premiums and disentangling the influence and interactions of their various price drivers. To provide it, the project undertakes a property and urban literature review. Based on theory’s insight that higher order contains lower order systems, it develops and investigates a general systems model of residential premiums with two modes. Conditioned by ideology and forced by population and capital inflows, whether mineral or industrially induced, premiums mutate. Their evolution is influenced by a nested hierarchy of more or less contaminated information. To investigate the model and its different modes, the project employs tests across system pointers, at the macro, urban and micro spatial resolutions. First, it assesses the turbulence and permeability of residential property markets to exogenous influences. It then looks for links between premiums and urban inputs in the coal-driven and Sunbelt migration city of Brisbane, Australia, over the boom from 1998-2004. Locally, it conducts a case study and survey in one micro-location, seeking clues in transaction patterns (output), property system agents (components) and the information used (feedback mechanisms). Finally, the project draws some relevant policy implications. Although the project examines Brisbane, in Australia, its ramifications are global. It concludes that capital inflows (from mining in this case), migration or debt accentuate the endogenous mutation of property from homes within a community towards speculative paper assets. High status locations unlock knowledge-economy privilege and offer under-taxed prospective returns. While fantasy can contaminate cognitive representations of attractiveness, price exuberance is often validated by government policy infrastructure. Either deliberately or by misconstruel, public urban renewal projects concentrate premiums in previously neglected but central locations. In euphoria, revitalization projects, media hubris, and frenetic housing market activity alter collective cognitive representations and spatially anchor price bubbles. Yet, within a wider social and ecological remit, rampant premiums suggest policy flaws. In terms of windfall events or unearned rent, the cumulative effects of ill-considered or ad hoc projects and price distortions can be ugly and wasteful. The unintended consequence of resource booms, credit binges or urban projects promoted with ‘knowledge-city’ or ‘creative-city’ discourses is unaffordable housing and disconnected fringe communities. In short, enlightened urban development must balance frequently contradictory urges of private gain against visionary collective welfare. It extends beyond reinforcement of central dominance by mega iconic artistic, biological, or other projects to embrace civics, broad education excellence (in contrast to islands of private privilege) and robust transport links. Within an independent legal system and sensible policy setting, an educated and trained workforce attracts investment and fosters technological innovation. Beyond the dogmas of unregulated markets or disjointed interventions, intelligent urban development impels cohesive projects and inclusive hubs in connected edge communities. Once excessive premiums are recognized as a serious social, economic, and urban problem, its cure involves, first, policy rationalization. Afterward, other practical steps are institutional reform, governance, price and tax rationalization and spatial transparency.