Ten years ago, a business trip to Perth meant one thing. Resources sector. Mining executive meetings, fly in fly out operations, a few nights at a CBD hotel, then back to Sydney or Melbourne. The city had its own economy and it largely ran itself without much input from the east coast.

That description doesn't hold anymore. Perth is growing at a pace that has caught a lot of people off guard and the profile of who is coming and why has changed considerably. If you haven't visited in a few years, the city will feel different to the one you remember.

Who is actually arriving now

Perth Airport has seen consistent growth in both domestic and international routes over the past three years. New direct connections to Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo have strengthened. Airlines don't add capacity on routes they can't fill and these routes are filling. The mix of passengers moving through the terminals tells you something real about a city's economic direction.

Corporate visitors arriving for mining sector business are still there. They've been joined by technology company representatives, renewable energy executives, international investors with Western Australian portfolios, and professional services firms that have established Perth offices for the first time.

A city that was on one industry's itinerary is now on several.

For anyone arriving for a first time business visit, Perth requires some adjustment. The city is more spread out then Sydney or Melbourne. The CBD is compact but the business districts that matter, West Perth, Subiaco, the airport industrial corridor, are distributed across a geography that doesn't always cooperate with taxis or public transport on a tight schedule. Corporate visitors who land at Perth Airport expecting to sort out transport on arrival often find the options more limited then they anticipated, particularly on early morning flights or late night international arrivals.

What is driving the growth

The lithium and critical minerals story sits at the centre of it. Western Australia supplies materials essential to battery manufacturing globally and Perth is the administrative hub for those operations. That has brought a different calibre of corporate activity to the city then the iron ore cycle produced. International capital, technology partnerships, and the kind of long term investment decisions that create sustained commercial traffic rather than cyclical peaks.

Population growth has added another layer. Interstate migration from Sydney and Melbourne has been running ahead of projections for several years, driven by housing affordability and the genuine lifestyle offer Perth makes to people who can work remotely or transition industries. International skilled migration in healthcare, construction and engineering has contributed further. The suburbs have been expanding outward and the inner city has been getting denser simultaneously.

Infrastructure following the growth

The METRONET rail expansion has extended train connections into suburbs that previously had limited public transport. The Westport project, long term planning for a new container port at Kwinana, represents the kind of infrastructure commitment that reflects genuine confidence in where the city is heading. You don't plan container ports for cities you expect to plateau.

The property market has moved accordingly. Suburbs that sat at modest prices five years ago have seen real demand driven movement. Rental vacancy rates are tight. The conversations about supply and affordability that Perth is now having echo what Sydney and Melbourne went through at earlier stages of their growth cycles.

What visiting Perth looks like in practice

The growth has changed the texture of a business visit to Perth. There are more restaurants worth going to. More hotels competing for corporate accounts. More reason to extend a trip by a day or two and see something of the city rather than flying in and out on the same calendar. The Swan Valley wine region sits 25 kilometres from the CBD. Fremantle is half an hour south. The beaches along the Indian Ocean coast are accessible from the city centre and genuinely worth the detour.

What hasn't changed is the geography. Perth is still spread out, the airport is still approximately 15 kilometres from the city, and the gap between a smooth corporate visit and a frustrating one still comes down largely to how the ground transport is handled. Executives with back to back meetings in different parts of the city, groups arriving on international flights with tight schedules, visitors heading straight from the airport to a client site. These are the moments where having the transport organised properly in advance makes a visible difference to how the day runs.

Perth is worth paying attention to. The growth has structural depth that single commodity booms don't usually carry. The city that was underestimated for a long time is becoming harder to overlook.