The announcement of a major subdivision outside the Queensland town of Gatton achieves in one project what hotspotting.com.au recently predicted was likely to happen - a doubling in the size of the town.

Gatton, a town of 9,000 residents west of Ipswich on the road to Toowoomba, is to be the site for a multi-stage $500 million development of a new prisons complex. The Queensland Hotspots report for sale on this website has predicted the number of employees eventually working at the complex will almost double the size of the town.

And yesterday developers Trinity and Consolidated Properties announced they had paid $17 million for a 355-hectare site on the outskirts of Gatton to develop a $300 million master-planned estate, eventually to accommodate 2,200 new homes (staged over the next 20 years).

Woodlands Rise will effectively double the size of the town, according to a report in the Toowoomba Chronicle. The developers say they have been attracted by the new prisons complex and the planned expansion of the University of Queensland campus just outside the town.