Aussie Real Estate Podcast
Tiny Homes & Prefab Housing: The Fast Solution to Australia’s Building Shortage
09 Jan 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the current state of Australia's housing shortage?
It's the Real Estate Podcast, brought to you by ANZ Home Loans for financial well-beings. Hey, welcome back to the Real Estate Breakfast. Hopefully, you are still in holiday mode. It is a Saturday, so the weekend has begun. And if you are back at work, you've got the weekend hopefully off. It is January the 10th. I know it's difficult to know what day it is, especially if you are on holiday.
Coming next, we are back into that time tunnel looking at all of the different real estate stories from last year to which there were many. We spoke to hundreds of real estate agents across the country. That is all going to kick off again this year. as we reflect back on our 2025 year. And that is next. You're listening to the Summer Series on The Real Estate Podcast.
You would probably make a really good auctioneer. Is that something you've thought about? I have thought about it, but I think I still prefer doing, helping people purchase homes and rent homes and do that sort of stuff. Auctioneering is good, but I think I might lose my voice after a little while.
Yeah, and I think, you know, as far as time management skills when it comes to school teachers, because that's, at the end of the day, you've got to have great time management skills. regardless of what industry you are in. But coming from a school teaching background, yeah, that is very, very transferable.
If you are a school teacher and you're listening to this podcast, what would you advise fellow school teachers? What would you say to them if they're thinking about getting involved in real estate? Back yourself, trust yourself because one, as you said, time management, you'd be able to put yourself in a position because it's very self-directed being in real estate.
You need to be able to put down your plan for the day and stick to it. And teachers are used to that because that's all they ever do is stick to a plan every day.
And the other thing would be with your personality, you'd be able to talk to a lot of people and understand and have empathy and have understanding of a lot of different situations in which every time you come across a different client, there's always a different situation of why they're selling or why they're buying. A very good answer. Now, let's talk about Narellan.
I mentioned this at the top. This is very close to Camden. Not everybody probably have heard of this suburb. Just tell people a little bit about where it is, etc., and why it has sort of grown. So Camden itself has been here for a long time as a suburb, very historical suburb, a lot of historical churches and buildings in the area.
It's at the end of Camden Valley Way, so Camden Valley Way starts all the way up near close to Liverpool area, coming down through the southwest. What we have now between Liverpool and Camden is a lot of development that's happened on either side, which used to be once farmlands, is now just a lot of houses which have been built.
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Chapter 2: How are tiny homes and prefab construction addressing the housing crisis?
This happened on Friday, sending around just under 4,000 residents fleeing from 764 apartments. If you are listening and wondering, well, what is the Dubai Civil Defence Agency actually look like when it comes to their equipment? Well, I can tell you they've got newer aerial fire trucks in Dubai that can pump water up to 32 floors. That's approximately 100 meters altitude.
Sharjah's civil defence is pioneering drone-based firefighting scaling to 150 metres. That is 40 floors in just 18 seconds, spraying water or foam with thermal imaging support. I mean, that's really high tech, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'd actually read about the drones before. They're just a little bit more than just a nice light show in the sky.
I mean, these things are very, very useful and it's good to see that actually they can get them that high with water to extinguish. But going back to this particular fire, yeah, I mean, it started late on Friday and the civil defence worked really, really well. The beauty here is that despite the tragedy of all this, nobody was hurt, thank goodness.
And not only was that tower evacuated, but for safety, they actually evacuated a couple of other towers either side. So everything was brought under control. Although it was the early hours of Saturday morning, they were still smouldering. It was a pretty big fire, actually. And we still don't know what happened or why it happened.
But as I say, thankfully, everybody got out and there were no injuries. Fitch is an American credit rating agency and the report said that up to 210,000 homes would be delivered in 2025-26 and prices could fall Lillian approximately by 15%. Good morning.
Good morning, Craig. Yeah, what a headline. I wanted to touch back on this because I have had a few clients, particularly from overseas, asking about how accurate the predictions are. Firstly, I'd like to make it very clear that, you know, this headline saying that the Dubai market is going to crash by 15% is actually quite misleading. Let's talk first about supply and delivery.
Yes, there are a lot of homes that are due to be handed over this year and next, but in Dubai, only about 56% of projects ever reach handover on time. So what this realistically means is that the number quoted of 210,000 homes handing over will actually be closer to about 120,000.
The other thing is that post-Trump tariffs, we're seeing delays and difficulties getting materials like steel and concrete. So this construction cost inflation will also further push handovers past their actual date that they're supposed to come over.
What would be a really interesting number to know is how many Australian grandparents are re-establishing themselves into different cities around Australia because they want to spend more time with their grandchildren. That'd be appalling. Absolutely wonderful to know. One of the problems with demographic data, meaning why or where is somebody moving?
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Chapter 3: What advantages do tiny homes offer over traditional housing?
get a little bit confused with median house price and average dwelling house price so yeah one million dollars big number exactly so what what we heard here the announcement is a rather unusual measurement so we get used to the median house price and the median measures the price of all the dwellings that have been sold they all those houses get lined up in a big fat row
And the house price exactly in the center of this big line, that is the median, just the middle price. It is very different from the average, because if you just have $100 million, super sexy luxury villa, it would inflate the average number. And so to make sure that those outliers are not in the data, we measure the median usually. So median house price is is what you would be used to.
The measure that was announced, I think last week, was the average dwelling price. So we're not just looking at houses, we're looking at apartments, flats as well. And if you take all of the units, houses sold, and you add up all the money divided by the number of dwellings, we now are over a million dollars.
Not that long ago, we were talking about container homes, shipping homes, these 40-foot containers being turned into little, small, tiny homes. And Simon, I know that we have spoken in the past about doing things at scale, massive factories being built around Australia. This is a really smart approach, of course, speeding up just how many homes that you can deliver.
But I'd be interested in your thoughts on container homes because this is starting to catch fire somewhat. Exactly. It targets a very specific niche. It's the idea I have a bit of room on my property. I want to plonk in another spare bedroom with a little kitchenette and a bathroom. traditional granny flat approach.
Maybe you want to do this to keep the teenagers, you know, outside of the main house so that they can be a bit more rowdy and louder. It is a wonderful, quick way of establishing housing. You pour a bit of concrete, you plunk this thing on top. This is a super quick way of adding bedrooms, of adding dwellings to the housing stock. I'm in massive support.
We do not have enough diversity in the housing market and this fills exactly this particular need.
I think it's an enormous boost to their esteem, to their ability, their capabilities. The first one is hard to get and once you get it, it's great. But when you get that next one or subsequent ones, it does say that you've got a strategy that's working and that you've planned for. And yeah, it's a great thing, great feeling.
Have you struck that before where somebody is bought from you and there is that self-doubt where they're saying, oh, Sharon, I'm not too sure if I'm doing the right thing here. I might end up losing the property down the track.
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Chapter 4: How can teachers transition into real estate successfully?
At the end of the day, without leverage, you don't have much.
Absolutely. But the leverage that you get from having your first home that you can then borrow against, but also that leverage in the learning that you're getting and the skills you're developing as a property investor, you get wiser and smarter and it's a strategy that you continue to do.
Growth is radiating outward from the city and Mango Hill in Moreton Bay South. Look at that price, that median price at the moment, $978,000. So it's just a matter of time before that hits the $1 million mark. How likely five years ago were you thinking that might happen?
Yeah, no, it wouldn't have. A lot of things contributed in the last few years to the growth in the area overall. Mango Hill has broadened and grown as a suburb itself. It's neighbouring on North Lakes and Redcliffe and Deception Bay.
It's a little pocket corridor that's infilled with new developments, a lot of unit development in the area and it's so close to all the amenities so the growth in there is still going to go. It's still still skyrocketing.
And is that something that sort of makes it interesting, like, you know, moving with the times and keeping up with the tech and sort of still sort of remaining relevant? I think that it's one of the most important things is to stay up to date with everything. But also, as I said, all markets are different and you really need to live and breathe a market to understand exactly what is going on.
to be able to buy well and make sure you're not making any mistakes. Making mistakes in real estate can be expensive. I was working in radio 30 years ago. And if somebody had told me 30 years on, I would be talking about real estate on a podcast. First question would have been, what's a podcast? And are you serious talking about real estate all day, every day? But here we are.
That's interesting because the different names and terminology of things, because we used to have teleseminars. We used to jump onto teleseminars and podcasts were just, yeah, you'd go, what is a podcast? I don't even know what that is. Things are constantly and continue to evolve. And just with your real estate and understanding what a market is doing, you need to evolve with the times.
Yeah, well, we definitely are evolving, no doubt about that, with nearly 1,300 episodes. Now, let's look at the old listings that are piling up across Australia. Melbourne's market dynamics reveal some unique pressure points. From SQM Research, it does show a 6.2% monthly rise in listings. That is over 180 days, driven by... Over-ambitious sellers hanging on to inflated prices.
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