Insane increase in vacancy rates in Australian cities

Yup it's a pretty good "bad" problem - it went up but wasn't nearly as bad as some other states. The vacancy rate for the whole metropolitan area is sitting just under 2%

 

Liverpool is actually after many years starting to clean up a bit.
Lurnea is also not the wreck it on was many new houses and Philip park getting a major $16,000,000 redevelopment. Im excited as we have a property in the area and this will draw much needed Gentrification to this strip.


Current Major Works

 

It’s really appalling how few family friendly apartments exist in Sydney. Government should have forced developers to have a good percentage of 3 and 4 bedroom apartments. Quality family apartments would change people’s perceptions toward apartment living and slow the urban sprawl.

 

True, but property development is highly regulated today, particularly in terms of environmental standards, so I don't think the answer is more regulation.

All of the regulation goals are laudable in many ways, but it does mean that for property development to be economically viable, they have to cut corners. This is why the quality of builds is worse now compared to say the 1960's and 1970's when there was almost zero regulation in this space. With less regulation, developers have the funds to build to consumer tastes.

 

Forced ?

Maybe force car companies to build SUVs?

You an have quality standards , environmental standards , safety and so on.

Hard to tell companies what to build if at the time the demand was not their.


As you can see i hate over regulation.

 

Over regulation has helped push up our property prices so can’t be too negative on it.

I see your point, maybe some financial encouragement to build more family friend units instead of straight out regulations. Eg we let you build a few extra levels if you include larger apartments. The problem is the shoebox low standard apartment is the most profitable and that is what developers will continue to churn out while ever investors both local and overseas are willing to buy them. This is not necessarily the best thing for the community in the long term.

 

Shoe boxes are only profitable after regulation has squeezed all of the profit out of it. Why did we build double brick homes when there was no regulation? The free market drops prices and increases quality, and regulation interferes with this process.

 

When property prices have never been higher you highlight a need for developers to cut corners in order to make them economically viable? I am in disbelief at such a poor excuse for greed. Build them right or don't build at all and the regulation costs will come down to meet the demand.

 

Please. It's just an economic principle that regulation drives up costs. Any one who has dropped their kids off at day care knows that.

 

I think the driving market for these small inner city apartments have been overseas investors, migrants, students, city workers.

So it makes sense they are the way they are.

 

australian construction standards , quality and building regulations (not planning) are a extremely light , the quality and building regs here are by comparsion with elsewhere almost non existent in the residential space

do a development in Europe and you’ll see what regulation is, and quality for that matter as well

standards here in residential construction are ridiculously poor

it’s the sky high labour cost and pre construction red tape and regulations drives the building costs , it not the actual build regs


it’s funny really as the country is on the other end of the scale in infrastructure etc

 

so when did Perth’s population start growing again ? 4 years ago we were told the exodus of people caused rising vacancy rates now suddenly there’s a shortage yet I didn’t hear anything about a new immigration boom.

 

this would make sense if central banks weren’t printing money to prop up markets. A lot of the demand in Melbourne came from foreign investors buying anything and everything so developers had no incentive to build decent apartments. ‘No regulation’ needs to apply to everything equally including the monetary system which means no post-gfc recovery for another decade but atleast we wouldn’t have all these zombie appartments/businesses/assets.

 

One of the demoralising observations of recent weeks was how hard the lockdowns are on less well off families since they have to spend so much more on heating with children at home. If we built to German standards our homes would cost almost nothing to heat ... and would stay cooler in the summer.

 

It’s actually laughable here how low the construction standards and specs and quality are by comparison,

One thing for sure is that materials have no bearing on why australia property is expensive compared to elsewhere

 

That is true after the resources construction boom a lot of people that came over for work went back home and vacancy rates rose. But what happened at the same time was that Perth "stopped" building new homes. It didn't literally stop but it almost halved new construction starts for the past 4-6 years so the natural population growth plus immigration has eaten up all that supply and Perth is heading towards under supply.

So no boom, just 6 years of eating away at the supply.

 

That's a timescale and weather thing.

Germany have houses that were constructed 500 years ago. The people that built them are long since deceased for most of the homes they have in that country. They don't need to build nearly as many structures for their population which has grown by less than 50% in the last 100 years (Australia's population has grown by 500%).

They also had to construct homes to deal with the temperatures they have. Every house is built like an oven/fridge.

We need buildings being made quickly and our weather is much more mild. That is the reason for the poor build quality.

Culturally, you could also argue we really like wide-open spaces, which explains the McMansions.