australia Crown, Melbourne
Builder’s breakfast
The front page of The Australian spoke of an age of austerity, record debt blamed by the Coalition government on the previous Labour administration, spending cuts, low interest rates and a recovering housing market. It could have been an English newspaper, if it wasn’t for the picture of celebrating cricketers.
York & George, Sydney
Australian
Drinking his bodyweight in flat whites and cold beers and feasting on backyard
barbecues, RUPERT BATES reports on the housebuilding scene from Australia
Christmas was a bad time to be an Englishman in Australia, but despite the current gulf in cricketing class after the embarrassment of an Ashes whitewash, the two countries are evenly matched when it comes to their obsession with property. House prices in Australia’s major cities rose by an average of 10% in the last year, the highest increase in four years. Sydney saw the strongest growth at 14.5% and a median house price of $775,000*. Melbourne prices were up 8.5% with $625,000 the median, with apartments coming in at $480,000. Perth prices were up nearly 10% and Brisbane rose just over 5%. As in the UK, some warn of a bubble, while housing affordability for first-time buyers as well as a supply shortage amid population growth are other familiar refrains. Australia currently builds around 160,000 homes a year, with the largest housebuilder, BGC, based in Western Australia and profiting from the huge state’s mining wealth. BGC built around 3,400 homes in the last financial year, followed by Alcock
Brown-Neaves (ABN) building 3,200 units. Melbourne-based Metricon ranks third in the Housing Industry Association’s annual Housing 100 Report with just over 2,800 housing starts; Meriton was Australia’s largest apartment builder with more than 2,500 properties built. Australia’s 100 largest housebuilders represent a third of the country’s national housing starts. “The increase in Housing 100 starts in 2012/13 was the first in three years. But current policy settings lack the focus on the residential construction industry that Australia’s economy and population require. It looks likely that disparities across regions and dwelling types will net out to a renewed decline in national housing starts in 2013/14,” comments Dr Harley Dale, HIA chief economist. Australia may be a big country, with Western Australia alone the size of Western Europe, but most development is still centred on the large, coastal cities and NIMBYs in the land of the backyard are numerous. “You get a lot of opposition to new development, especially in the inner suburbs. In Melbourne, the Victorian
showhouse January 2014 | 57
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