Australia faces a shortage of more than 100,000 homes within the next five years as housing construction fails to keep up with demand, according to a new government report. More than half of that will be in apartments, and the biggest shortfalls will be seen in Sydney and Melbourne.
There will be 1.8m new households created over the next 10 years, in a period in which the population grows amid increasing immigration, people become richer, more live alone or in couples, and more work from home, the report by the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation says.
But the construction industry is facing pressures that are reducing the number of new dwellings being completed, including tight supply of labour and materials, the availability of land, building approvals, bad weather, and interest rate rises.
The following charts show the cumulative shortfall in housing each year – a running total that includes the shortfall or surplus from the preceding years.
Despite the current rental crisis, more new dwellings have been completed in 2022-23 (148,500) than new households created (139,200). But the forecast is for significantly fewer dwellings to be completed over the next few years, even as the number of new households continues to increase.
By 2028 the shortfall is predicted to be more than 103,000 dwellings.
The deficit is almost entirely in the construction of new apartments and medium-density dwellings. Almost all of the current surplus between new homes and new households is in detached dwellings (such as single-family homes). And without a predicted boom in detached dwellings later on this decade, the shortfall will be even worse.
The NHFIC predicts that the number of apartments and medium-density dwellings brought to the market in 2025-26 will be 30% below pre-pandemic levels, and continue to be 14% below in 2030.
Housing affordability, especially for renters, is likely to become even worse in Sydney and Melbourne, according to the report. The data shows that the bulk of the current surplus in new dwellings is in Sydney and Melbourne. However, they also face the largest deficits going forward.
The rest of the capital cities are already seeing fewer homes created than new households. Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane will all see deficits get worse over the next decade, while Darwin and Canberra will be roughly flat.
