Apartment approvals continue slide downwards
Stark warning from the Property Council after another set of statistics showed a second month a row decline in approvals.
AUSTRALIA will fall well short of its 1.2 million target for new homes if the number of apartments continues to flounder.
That’s the stark warning from the Property Council after another set of statistics showed a second month a row decline in approvals.
The total number of approved homes fell by 5.7 per cent in April to 14,633, according to seasonally adjusted data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
With Australia needing to build over 20,000 homes each month to reach a target of 1.2 million new homes by 2029, it makes grim reading.
The 2,539 apartments that were approved in April is a 17.38 per cent drop from the 3,073 approved in March.
This means that 5,612 apartments were approved across March and April, compared with 8,625 approved across January and February.
Approvals for single-family homes rose by 3.1 per cent in April, in seasonally adjusted terms.
Property Council Group Executive Policy and Advocacy Matthew Kandelaars said the apartment market is still facing a challenging environment.
“While apartment approval numbers are volatile, this is two months in a row of significant falls,” he said.
“Just 5,612 apartments were approved in March and April. This is a far cry from the 15,029 greenlit during March and April in the apartment boom of 2016.
“We will not meet our housing targets without the heavy lifting that needs to come from apartments that can deliver homes at scale close to transport, existing infrastructure and amenities.
“Even with approval in hand, it can take years for a project to start construction, held back by a tight labour market, high construction costs and complicated planning systems.
“Despite a welcome and ambitious target and hard work through the last term of the federal parliament, for many Australians, the dream of home ownership is increasingly unaffordable or completely out of reach.
“State and territory governments need to step up. Planning is key to delivering more homes, and our approvals data shows that the current systems are not working. More must be done to cut red tape and streamline our planning systems to remove uncertainty.”
