Councils across Australia have been called on to ask landlords to make more properties available to renters.
Eurobodalla Shire mayor Mathew Hatcher last year wrote to NSW South Coast holiday home owners begging them to put unoccupied houses on the rental market, which resulted in more than 30 property owners telling the council they intended to or had already put their secondary property up for rent.
Real Estate Institute of Australia chief executive Anna Neelagama used a National Rural Press Club (NRPC) address on Tuesday to call on councils across the country to do the same.
"Around $60 million was allocated for the new National Housing and Homelessness Agreement," she said.
"We should use small sums of money for this to contact all ratepayers in Australia through different LGAs (Local Government Areas) and get them to seek any empty or latent homes back into the permanent rental pool.
"Fixing the problem is actually quite simple. We know, for the most, the answers.
"We need to do two things. One: we need to better use the homes we have already built. And two: we need to build more homes."
Ms Neelagama said an occupancy audit of local, state, and federal-government-owned housing and land should also occur.
"Many of our rural and real estate agents can point out the sad case of police houses, teachers' houses, going empty," she said.
"Of state-owned land being land-banked and not developed.
"This is not acceptable and we must do something about it and it would only take a small amount of money to do this work."
Operation Snail
Helen Haines, independent MP for the regional Victorian electorate of Indi, was also on the NRPC panel and said more needed to be done to fund critical infrastructure to enable more housing developments in regional areas.
"Infrastructure like functioning sewage systems, drainage systems that communities like Wangaratta and Benalla desperately need to fix But local councils with very, very small rural ratepayer bases don't have the money to do massive investment like this," she said.
"Without this infrastructure, it's going to be hard to fix the crisis in supply."
Ms Haines referenced the Victorian government's post-war housing program called Operation Snail, which produced pre-fabricated homes at a rate of 40 a week.
"It's not about operating at a snail's pace; it's about bringing materials on your back," she said.
"With record rises in rent and mortgage stress and a lack of housing availability like we have never seen before in regional Australia, we've got to think creatively.
"We need medium-density housing. We need social housing. We need worker housing. We need clever housing and we need to bring the community with us."
Ms Neelagama agreed that different models needed to be tried.
"We need to look at highly targeted programs in our regions where they've got the best opportunity to grow the economy and build homes there as rapidly as we can to house key workers, through prefabricated homes, modular homes, and any homes we can get on the ground quickly," she said.
"We know the kind of repair program for social, affordable public housing is very long and it's extraordinary, and we need help to fix it and troubleshoot it."
Climate resilient
In many parts of the country, the housing crisis has been amplified by natural disasters, as houses have been destroyed or damaged by floods and bushfires.
Executive director of Anglicare Kasy Chambers told the NRPC that housing affordability and insurance was being made worse by increasing natural disasters.
"We need to make sure that the houses that we currently have are going to offer people some resistance to climate change and the ones we're replacing them with also do that," she said.
"Certainly many of my colleagues around the country are still working with people who are going into their third winter in a pod or a caravan.
"We do need to make sure that we're across the impact that these natural disasters have on our housing and start to think as well about insurance."
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