Property Council urges government to adopt BTR proposal to increase housing supply

The Property Council of Australia has again urged Parliamentarians to pass the federal government’s housing legislation through both houses of Parliament, starting with Help to Buy this week.

Australia is only building 160,000 homes against the 240,000 homes needed annually to hit our national target of 1.2m new homes by 2029.

Property Council chief executive Mike Zorbas said the longer we wait to pass housing legislation the longer the housing crisis drags on.

“These last few sitting weeks of the year are the right time to sideline entrenched political views and pass legislation to build more homes and get more Australians onto the property ladder,” Mike said.

“This should not take a double dissolution election. Neither of the housing bills are a silver bullet but we are decades behind in supplying the at market and social housing Australia needs.

“The Property Council, Community Housing Industry Association and National Shelter have put forward a build-to-rent proposal to create 105,000 additional rental homes over the next decade, 10 per cent of which would be affordable.

“We need bipartisan support to fix the legislation before the Senate and unlock massive additional investment in rental housing at a time when the supply of new apartments is at half of 2017 levels."

Current housing headwinds operating in most state markets include high cost and hurdles of financing, a decade of high new household formation, catch-up immigration pains, years of rising material and labour inputs, decreasing construction productivity, low market capacity, labour market competition and cost escalation from historically large infrastructure builds and green/energy infrastructure construction, planning delays, looming ACCC acquisitions red
tape, sluggish environmental and cultural approvals and ever-changing and disruptive state property taxes and especially those on overseas investors.

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