While housing supply increased from 403 dwellings per 1000 people in 2011 to 420 per 1000 people by 2022, Australia has not kept pace with international peers.Australia’s housing supply is lagging behind other OECD countries, recent data shows, but building more homes will only fix part of the problem, experts say.
While Australia’s housing supply increased from 403 dwellings per 1000 people in 2011 to 420 per 1000 people by 2022, the country failed to keep pace with international peers and the OECD average, the federal budget paper noted. She said while there was definitely an acute need for more new homes to “catch up with new demand”, as well as more investment in social housing, other measures to improve the use of established homes should be considered.“New housing supply only adds to the existing housing stock a bit at a time, so it will take a long time for new housing supply to have any positive impact on affordability. The majority of our housing stock is made up of established dwellings,” she said.
Economist Saul Eslake said while Australia’s demographic make-up did differ from many of the countries in the OECD, it was similar to Canada, yet they had increased their housing supply at a greater rate between 2011 and 2022.