Today’s release of the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation’s (NHFIC) State of the Nation’s Housing 2022-23, was welcomed by UDIA National, as it highlights the housing crisis we are facing if we do not move now to boost development ready supply.
“The report confirms that the housing market is in steep decline with a shortfall of 106,300 at-market houses by 2027 as well as the 377,600 shortfall of homeless, affordable and social housing. When combined with escalating price increase makes it increasingly difficult to turn around,” said Maxwell Shifman, UDIA National President.
NHFIC has confirmed that slowing supply, together with increasing household formation is expected to lead to a supply shortfall of 106,300 dwellings over the 5 years to 2027. That means Australia is currently going backwards by 21,260 houses a year. But the news gets worse with apartment and medium density delivery predicted to be 40% lower than even 2010 supply delivery.
Critically, NHFIC has also identified that the supply of affordable and social housing is currently short 331,000 houses with the homelessness housing shortfall sitting at 46,500.
“Affordability issues are deeply impacted by a chronic lack of development-ready land and there have been multiple factors that have strangled housing delivery, from high interest rates, tight labour and materials markets, diminishing availability of development ready land and even bad weather. But none of this alters the fact that we need to ramp up initiatives that free up development ready supply, or we will simply see higher and higher costs eviscerate Government’s key affordable housing initiatives,” said Mr Shifman.
Unfortunately, NHFIC’s own numbers show, we only deliver (net) 2,000 affordable and social houses a year and while the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) will seek to double those numbers over five years, this is a very difficult task that needs the entire housing market (private sector and CHPs) working together to solve the issue.
UDIA National is keen to work with Government over the coming months on implementing the HAFF investment framework to solve our affordable housing crisis and establish a development ready land pipeline metric to ensure the housing initiatives have the best chance of success.
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Media enquiries: Deanna Lane dlane@udiansw.com.au, 0416 295 898