Thought i wanted to pursue the issue more on housing supply compared to population growth in Australia, so i did some figures using ABS data and compared the average number of persons per household with the average number of persons per dwelling completions.

I came up with some interesting figures - mainly reflecting that we have been overbuilding for decades. Some periods (early-mid 90's) we were building a new dwelling for every 1.1 persons in Australia when the avg per household was 2.8 persons. The current period is close to even with a dwelling created for every 2.4 people when the approx. persons per household is 2.5.

I'm sure there is a small element of dwelling DEstruction, but bearing in mind that many torrens title properties are replaced with strata units and could potentially be replaced with 50 units for one house.

I've done my best with the figures for avg person per household as the figures haven't been done since 2001 (2.6 p/household) but i've been keeping it in line with trends since 1980 when it was 2.9 p/household.

Dwelling completions include all residential property (houses & units). The avg people per household is calculated across the board for all these types of dwellings so some units might have 1-2 people in them, but some houses would have 3-6 people. Population is calculated using births, deaths and NET migration as well as natural increase factoring aging population.

Anyway, this being one of the subjects i was sitting on the fence about , i'm pretty convinced now that's its all just media hype and that the rental shortage is merely a reflection of the influx of FHB's unable to afford to buy. This would reflect the increasing supply of vending machine on the buy side and the lack of supply on the rental side.



I was begining to get irritated about the articles that indicated that we had x amount of population growth and were only building y amount of houses. Obviously you don't need one . house per person. Not even close. I'm always dubious as to how those reported in the media decide that we need 190,000 new homes for the coming year. No one ever seems to indicate how that figure is concluded. I mean we are seeing net population growth of 330,000, and at 2.5 persons per household you would conclude we only need 132,000 dwellings, and we are currently producing 165,000. If they are basing this on future expectations, then that is simply speculation, and besides, we have established there are plenty of empty homes leftover from previous decades of overbuilding as indicated by the same figures they no doubt are using discount lenses.