As Jeroen Weimar noted, around 70,000 new homes were completed in Victoria in the first 14 months of the #housingstatement. Approx. 5,000 per month.
🧮80,000 p.a = 6,666 per month on average, thus Victoria is already 33% off the pace.
Of course, none of the 70,000 have any connection to the Housing Statement or #housingannouncementweek. With the lag between approvals, commencements and completions, homes finished in this period would have been approved 3+ years ago.
The last two years of approvals sit around 50,000 p.a., meaning the forward projections don't look great. Try around 40,000 completions per year for the next two years.
So the first 3 years of the Housing Statement are on track to deliver circa 140,000 total new dwellings – nearly 100,000 short of the goal for that period!
Put differently, an average of over 94,000 new homes per annum for the balance 7 years would be needed to hit 800,000! 🚫There is zero chance of that happening (as I've stated in The Age).
🧊Below zero.
So where is it going wrong?
Current policy is not looking critically at every opportunity to unlock more feasible, development-ready land, whether Metro Melbourne, growth areas or regions. And nothing announced so far will deliver enough new supply otherwise.
The obsession remains with mid-high rise apartment development. This is still too expensive to be #feasible or #attainable at scale, and will be for some time. That's assuming enough people want it in the first place.
The current State budget prevents sufficient stimulus, investment or reversal of tax policy to fix this.
Even if these projects were feasible, there are not enough commercial builders to deliver them at the numbers required. The labour and materials pool continues being absorbed by the Big Build infrastructure projects.
And if things pick up in a few years, industry can't ramp up from a record-low run rate of ~40,000 homes up to nearly 100,000 p.a. quickly enough.
✅To get close to targets we would need to be unlocking land and fast–tracking all feasible #development projects right now. Approving everything on the table right now wouldn't even get to the numbers needed.
🤔Judgement will be on performance not promises.