UDIA welcomes the opportunity to provide our recommendations on the Merger Notification Thresholds for ACCC to identify and safeguard against anti-competitive behaviour (the proposal).
UDIA National champions the ACCC mission to prevent anti-competitive impacts from mergers and acquisitions. It is critical to ensuring the appropriate operation of markets. It is extremely difficult to successfully operate in housing development industry (and market), and our members must have a level playing field that maintains competitive marketplace for the benefit of all operators.
It is important to get the thresholds and notifications right in order to ensure the ACCC is not missing critical activities, swamped by irrelevant notifications nor inadvertently undermining housing projects and businesses.
Our members are concerned that unless several changes are made including revising/clearly defining the turnover thresholds and strictly targeting the intended applicants, the ACCC will:
1) capture significantly more irrelevant transactions and be unable to clear applications in a timely fashion.
2) inadvertently restrict the core business of housing providers – housing projects are inventory for Developers to generate cashflow revenue, not strategic plays to increase market share.
3)cause projects to fall through because of application delays pausing transactions.
Our full Submission can be found at the download button below