Michael Hopkins
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2022
last heard Jul 2022
Michael Hopkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Good morning to you, Craig.
Well, look, Canberra has been growing strongly for many years, as you point out, and that 14.4% increase, so more than 57,000 people have moved to the ACT in the last five years, and
And that's really proving a strong driver for our housing market and for land sales, unit and apartment sales.
And our expectation is that this will continue for many years to come in Canberra.
If you're listening to this from outside of the ACT, you'll probably find Canberra's land release system and development system fairly unique compared to most Australian states and territories.
For a start, the ACT government effectively owns the land and leases it on a long-term lease to residents.
But also when it comes to releasing new land supply, the planning and development and even the sales and marketing of the land is actually undertaken predominantly by the ACT government through their suburban land agency.
So that means effectively the government here owns a property development arm, if you like.
And it's competing in the market with other property developers, except that the SLA, the Suburban Land Agency, holds a pretty dominant position.
I mean, almost every land release here is a government land release.
Now, what that means is that, in our view, the supply of that new land hasn't kept up with the demand.
It hasn't kept up with that population growth that we were talking about just before.
So when there is a release of land in one of our new suburbs, there's this massive demand from buyers through the ballot system for blocks available.
And to give you an idea how much, we're seeing thousands of people applying for a stage release, which might be 50 to 100 blocks.
So in the order of 100 people applying for every block available.
And anyone that has studied Economics 101 would understand the relationship between supply and demand and price.
And that has meant our land price has been skyrocketing over the last few years because of that undersupply of new land into the market.
It means that Canberra's housing is now, average housing is now above a million dollars.
We've exceeded Melbourne's average house price and we're heading for Sydney to nearly be Australia's most expensive capital city to buy house and land, which is quite amazing.
Well, look, like most parts of Australia, Canberra is certainly suffering a skill shortage in the building and construction industry in particular.
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