The Housing Predicament

A record of the current position, with sources and without argument. Prices, rents and vacancy; what is being built and by whom; the money committed, the workforce, the builders failing; land, empty homes, foreign ownership and demand — capital city and country. What Sovereign Australia proposes is set out separately.

1. What it costs to live here now

Perth's median dwelling value reached $1,046,551 in June 2026, up 23.9 per cent over the year. That is a record high, and it is ahead of every other Australian capital at a time when most have stopped rising.

The million-dollar threshold was crossed for the first time in the final quarter of 2025, at $1.09 million. Perth became the sixth Australian capital with a median above a million dollars.

Rents moved with it. The median house rent across Perth is $720 a week, up 5.9 per cent over the year, and the median apartment rent is $690, up 6.2 per cent. House rents first reached $700 in August 2025 and have not returned below it.

The market is tight rather than merely expensive. Total listings rose 16.7 per cent over the year and homes still sell in a median of 14 days, about half the time taken across the combined capitals. More stock is reaching the market and it is being absorbed faster than it arrives. The rental side of the same shortage is at section 3.

2. What is being built, by state and territory

The national figure hides very different performances. Each jurisdiction carries a share of the 1.2 million target set by its population at the time the Accord was agreed — New South Wales 377,000, and the others in proportion.

After eighteen months, every state and territory had fallen behind its required run rate. The spread between them is wide.

Table 2.1 — Progress against Accord share, by jurisdiction

Jurisdiction shares are implied population-share targets rather than negotiated quotas. Completion dates are the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council's estimates as at March 2026, based on leading indicators rather than an assumption that current rates continue.

The reforms are not uniform either. The Australian Capital Territory relaxed zoning for middle-density housing and removed third-party appeals for public housing, and approved 117 per cent more dwellings in the year to January than in the twelve months before. Victoria, which has pursued density in priority areas and streamlined approvals, saw building approvals fall 1 per cent over the same period.

3. The rental market

Vacancy is the measure that decides whether a renter has any choice. A balanced market sits between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent. The decade before the pandemic averaged 2.5 per cent nationally.

The national rate was 1.3 per cent in June 2026, with 39,229 dwellings vacant across the country. It had touched 1.0 per cent in March, the tightest reading in a year. Every capital city is below 2 per cent.

Table 3.1 — Rental vacancy rates by capital city, June 2026

SQM Research, June 2026. A rate below 2 per cent is generally described as an acute shortage; below 1 per cent leaves a prospective tenant with effectively no choice of dwelling, location or price.

Rents follow vacancy with a short lag. National rental growth was running at 8.1 per cent a year in June 2026, against wage growth of 3.4 per cent. The average Australian renter spends 33.4 per cent of pre-tax income on rent, above the 30 per cent threshold conventionally used to define housing stress. That gap is the definition of deteriorating affordability, and it has persisted through every quarter of the Accord.

4. The National Housing Accord

The Accord is the central commitment. Agreed in 2022 between the Commonwealth, the states and territories, local government, unions and the major building companies, it sets a target of 1.2 million new homes between July 2024 and June 2029.

That is 240,000 completions a year, or 60,000 a quarter, sustained for five years. It is supported by payments to the states, including a $3 billion New Homes Bonus that rewards jurisdictions for exceeding their share.

The target is a completion target, not an approval target. A home counts when someone can live in it.

5. What it has delivered

By the end of March 2026, twenty-one months into the five-year period, 307,635 homes had been completed against the 420,000 required to remain on schedule. The shortfall is 112,365 dwellings, or 26.8 per cent below the required run rate.

Table 5.1 — Annual dwelling demand, completions and the resulting shortfall

Completions are 307,635 across 21 months, expressed as an annual rate. Demand estimates are at section 12.3 and are not all constructed on the same basis. The shortfall row compares completions with the Accord target rather than with any single demand estimate.

Commencements tell the same story earlier in the chain. 331,903 homes had started against 420,000 needed — 88,097 short.

The March 2026 quarter produced 43,816 completions against a target of 60,000, and starts fell to 48,012. The strongest quarter of the entire Accord remains its first, September 2024, at 45,410 completions — and even that was roughly 15,000 below the quarterly requirement.

To recover the accumulated shortfall and still reach 1.2 million by June 2029, Australia would now need to complete around 69,000 homes every quarter for the remainder of the program. No quarter since the Accord began has come within 23,000 of that figure.

6. The money on the table

The Commonwealth has committed substantial sums. They are worth setting out in full, because the argument that follows is not that nothing is being spent.

Table 6.1 — Commonwealth housing programs and commitments

Commonwealth Rent Assistance is annual expenditure; the others are program totals over several years. The Accord separately funds 10,000 affordable homes over five years from 2024, to be matched by up to 10,000 from the states and territories.

The states and territories spend more than the Commonwealth on social housing directly. In 2024–25 their net recurrent expenditure was $5.9 billion, up $0.4 billion on the previous year, with a further $4.9 billion in capital expenditure.

A jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction split is not published on a comparable basis. The Productivity Commission reports the aggregate; individual state budgets use different definitions, periods and treatments of refurbishment against new build.

6.1 Supply-side and demand-side

The programs fall into two groups that behave very differently, and the distinction matters more than the dollar amounts.

Supply-side. The Future Fund, the Accelerator, the Infrastructure Facility, the Local Infrastructure Fund and the New Homes Bonus all pay for houses to exist, or for the water and roads that let them be built.

Demand-side. Help to Buy provides a shared-equity stake so a buyer needs a smaller deposit and loan. The Home Guarantee Scheme allows purchase with a five per cent deposit and no lenders mortgage insurance. Commonwealth Rent Assistance, at $6.4 billion a year, is the largest housing payment the Commonwealth makes and none of it builds anything.

A supply program adds houses. A demand program adds capacity to bid for houses that already exist. The two are not interchangeable.

7. The labour shortage, and what is being done

The federal housing minister has put the requirement at 90,000 additional construction workers. That figure is the constraint on everything above it: land can be released, approvals accelerated and money appropriated, and none of it produces a house without someone to build it.

The principal response is the Key Apprenticeship Program, whose housing construction stream opened in July 2025. An eligible apprentice receives $10,000 in incentive payments on top of wages — $2,000 at six, twelve, twenty-four and thirty-six months and on completion. The employer receives $5,000, extended to December 2026. The Commonwealth committed approximately $627 million over four years from 2025–26.

Alongside it sit Fee-Free TAFE, running since 2023, and three migration and recognition measures: $85.2 million to accelerate skills assessments for skilled migrants in the trades, $75.1 million over four years for a new trade skills assessment system, and $5.6 million to recognise tradespeople trained overseas who are in Australia on other visas. The government estimates the first could cut time to enter the workforce by up to six months.

7.1 What it has produced

More than 25,000 people started a housing construction apprenticeship in the program's first ten months, with 17,729 receiving payments as at early 2026 and over 4,000 commencing in the first two months of that year.

Those are real numbers and they are moving in the right direction. They are also commencements, not completions. An apprenticeship runs three to four years, so a worker starting under this program in 2026 is productive at trade level after the Accord has ended. Historically, a substantial share of apprentices do not finish.

Against a stated requirement of 90,000 workers, 25,000 commencements over ten months is roughly a quarter of the gap, arriving after the deadline it was meant to help meet.

7.2 The change that cut the other way

From 1 January 2026 the incentive system was narrowed. Employer payments were restricted to small and medium enterprises and Group Training Organisations, so large residential builders are no longer eligible for direct apprentice incentives. Occupations outside the priority list lost Commonwealth incentives entirely, and priority occupations outside the Key Apprenticeship Program had their support halved from $5,000 to $2,500.

The Housing Industry Association warned that reducing incentives risks discouraging apprentice uptake, particularly among employers already training at scale. Master Builders Australia's assessment of the same budget named cuts to apprenticeship funding alongside the housing target it is meant to serve.

8. The builders going under

A house under construction is not a house. If the builder fails before completion, the dwelling does not count toward the target, the deposit is at risk, and the site sits idle while an administrator works through the contracts.

Construction has been Australia's worst industry for insolvency for four years running. It now accounts for roughly one in four company failures nationally, in an industry that is nothing like a quarter of the economy.

Table 8.1 — Construction company insolvencies, 2022 to 2025-26

Companies entering external administration for the first time. ASIC insolvency statistics published 13 July 2026, data to 28 June 2026. Calendar and financial year figures are drawn from different releases and are indicative of the trend rather than directly comparable.

The 2025–26 figure is the first annual decline since the post-pandemic increase began. The rate of increase had slowed in each of the two preceding years.

8.1 Why they fail

The cause is well documented and it is not mismanagement. Builders signed fixed-price contracts between 2020 and 2022, then delivered them through the sharpest materials and labour inflation in decades. A contract signed at $450,000 in 2021 could cost $630,000 to build.

Labour shortage compounds it. Every additional week on site is holding cost, insurance and supervision that was never in the quote, and the shortage at section 7 makes every build slower.

Many firms that survived the worst of it did so by accumulating tax debt, deferring superannuation and stretching supplier terms. Those debts are now being called in, which is why failures continued after the fixed-price backlog cleared.

8.2 What it costs the target, and the customer

The collapses are not evenly spread. New South Wales recorded 1,522 construction insolvencies in 2025–26 and Victoria 984 — together roughly 73 per cent of the national total, and New South Wales is also the jurisdiction furthest behind its Accord share.

The scale of individual failures matters as much as the count. Porter Davis Homes went into liquidation with approximately 1,700 homes in progress. Lloyd Group's collapse affected 59 projects worth more than $350 million.

Each of those is a household that paid a deposit, holds a loan, and has no house. Domestic building insurance covers part of the loss in most states, with caps and exclusions that vary by jurisdiction, and the loan agreement is with the lender rather than the builder — so a collapse does not reduce what the customer owes.

Dwellings held in an administration remain counted as under construction until the matter is resolved. A dwelling stuck in an administration is counted as under construction for as long as it takes to resolve, and it is not a home anyone can live in.

9. Empty homes

The 2021 Census counted 1,043,776 unoccupied private dwellings — about 10 per cent of the national housing stock. The figure is accurate, it is regularly quoted, and on its own it is close to useless.

9.1 What the million actually contains

The Census records whether a dwelling was occupied on one night in mid-August. Where no form is returned and no other information is available, the dwelling is generally recorded as unoccupied. That single-night snapshot sweeps in several categories that are nothing like an empty house.

• Homes between tenants, or with the occupant away for the night.
• Homes awaiting settlement — 647,000 dwellings were sold in 2021.
• Holiday homes, empty on a winter Tuesday. Two million Australians own a property other than their own home.
• Homes under renovation or awaiting demolition.

The geography confirms it. Unoccupied dwellings cluster in coastal and sea-change districts — Robe in South Australia, Queenscliffe in Victoria, the Central Highlands in Tasmania — rather than in the cities where the shortage is. And the proportion has been broadly flat: 2021 was slightly lower than 2016, not higher.

The figure counts dwellings unoccupied on one night. It does not measure dwellings available for housing.

9.2 The number that survives scrutiny

Long-term vacancy is the measure that matters, and it has to be built from something other than a census form. Prosper Australia uses water consumption records: a dwelling using no water across an entire year is empty across that year.

On that method, roughly 1.5 per cent of Melbourne houses were long-term vacant in 2023, and about half of the city's census-recorded vacancies are genuine long-term vacancies — on the order of 82,000 homes.

The New South Wales Parliamentary Research Service reached a similar order in 2025. Against 298,510 dwellings vacant on any measure in 2021, it put genuine long-term vacancy at somewhere between 15,000 and 43,185 — 0.5 to 1.4 per cent of the state's stock, with the width of that range reflecting how poor the underlying data is.

On the available measures, long-term vacancy runs in the low tens of thousands of dwellings per large state. No more precise national figure is published.

9.3 What is being done about it

Victoria has run a vacant residential land tax since 1 January 2018: 1 per cent of capital improved value on habitable homes left unoccupied for more than six months of the preceding year. From 1 January 2026 it also applies to empty residential blocks across inner and middle Melbourne, aimed at land banking.

Enforcement is the hard part, because the state has to find the empty dwellings before it can tax them. A compliance investigation of five apartment towers identified 177 liable properties and produced 337 assessments covering the 2019 to 2024 tax years, and the government now runs a public tip-off line.

Where such taxes have run longest the effect is visible. Vancouver's empty homes tax raised $231 million between 2018 and 2020, and the number of properties assessed as vacant fell from 8,920 to 6,556 as owners rented, sold or moved in. The revenue is a by-product; the dwellings returning to use are the point.

Australia has no national equivalent. The Commonwealth levies an annual vacancy fee on foreign-owned residential property, and Victoria taxes vacancy in parts of Melbourne. In every other state a habitable house may sit empty indefinitely at no cost to its owner beyond rates.

10. Apartments, and who owns them

Apartments are the part of the housing system that was supposed to absorb the growth, and they are the part that has failed most completely.

10.1 The pipeline that did not start

In the March 2026 quarter Australia completed 23,730 houses and 16,936 other dwellings — apartments, townhouses and units. House completions fell 5.7 per cent over the year. Other dwellings rose 13 per cent, which sounds better than it is, because they were recovering from a very low base.

The cause is a financing deadlock rather than a planning one. A developer needs pre-sales before construction can start. Buyers hesitate at current borrowing costs. Banks will not release finance without the pre-sales. The chain stalls at the first link, and it stalled for the Accord's first two years — which is why the apartment pipeline that should have been delivering by now is only beginning to move.

Confidence is the other half. Buyers who watched the defect failures of the last decade will not commit to an off-the-plan apartment on the strength of a brochure, and the deposit sits at risk for two years while the building goes up. Section 8 explains what happens when the builder does not last that long.

10.2 Foreign ownership

Foreign purchase of residential property is more tightly controlled than most people assume, and the controls tightened again recently.

• Residential land carries a $0 threshold — approval is required regardless of price.
• Foreign persons are banned from buying established dwellings from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2029, with limited exceptions.
• Purchases are channelled into new or near-new dwellings and vacant land for development, on the principle that foreign investment should add to the housing stock rather than compete for it.
• Vacant land approvals are generally conditional on construction being completed within four years.
• Every acquisition must be recorded on the Register of Foreign Ownership of Australian Assets.

An annual vacancy fee applies to any foreign-owned dwelling not occupied or genuinely available for rent for at least 183 days in a year. Since April 2024 the fee has been double the original foreign investment application fee, and it is charged whether or not the owner lodges — failing to lodge a return on time can make the owner liable regardless of actual occupancy.

The amounts are not trivial. A foreign buyer of a $1.5 million apartment pays an application fee in the order of $31,300 and, if the dwelling sits empty for six months, a vacancy fee of roughly $62,600 for that year.

There is no published, current, jurisdiction-level count of how many Australian dwellings are foreign-owned, or how many attract the vacancy fee each year.

11. Land, and what it costs

Every dwelling in this memo sits on a block of land, and the block is the part of the price that no builder controls and no apprentice can produce faster.

11.1 The decade in the price of a block

Median lot values rose in every capital over the decade to September 2025. The more revealing figure is the second column, because over the same period median lot sizes fell in every capital except Brisbane.

Table 11.1 — Change in median lot price and price per square metre, decade to September 2025

Decade to September 2025. The first column is the rise in the price of a lot; the second is the rise in the price of a square metre of land. Median lot sizes fell over the period in every capital except Brisbane.

Buyers did not simply pay more for land. They paid roughly twice as much per square metre and received a smaller block. In Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart the price of a square metre of residential land approximately doubled in ten years.

The building on top of it moved the same way. The cost of building a new house in Perth now runs at roughly $3,000 to $4,000 a square metre, against about $1,000 in 2020.

11.2 The Perth land crunch

Perth's land market is the tightest in the country and the numbers are recent. The average price of a new lot in Greater Perth reached $424,025 in the March 2026 quarter — a record, up 18.3 per cent over the year and 78 per cent over five years. It had crossed $400,000 for the first time only one quarter earlier.

Supply is the reason. At 31 March 2026 there were 386 lots on the market across all of Greater Perth, against a five-year rolling average of 1,237. That is the second lowest count recorded since September 2018.

The growth corridors carry the demand. In the North West Corridor, driven by estates in the City of Wanneroo, 1,002 lots sold in the quarter at an average of $420,605 — up nearly 20 per cent on the year.

11.3 What "land release" actually means

Governments announce land release in hectares or lot numbers. Neither is a house, and the distance between the announcement and a titled block is where the delay lives.

A parcel has to be rezoned, then subdivided, then serviced with water, sewerage, power and roads, then titled, before anyone can build. Each step has its own approval and its own queue, and the infrastructure is frequently the binding one — which is what the $2 billion Local Infrastructure Fund at section 6 is intended to address.

So a release announced today reaches the market years later, and the lots on the market today were released under a previous government's decisions. The 386 lots available in Perth are the output of choices made well before the current shortage was acute.

11.4 Who pays for the pipes

Servicing land costs money, and over three decades governments moved that cost off the general tax base and onto the new dwelling. The developer pays the contribution, the price of the lot carries it, and the first buyer borrows it over thirty years.

The charges are substantial and they vary widely. In Greater Sydney the Housing and Productivity Contribution is levied at $12,000 per new dwelling lot at the full rate, discounted to $9,000 during the current concession period, with medium and high density at $10,000 a dwelling. Regional New South Wales pays $8,000 a lot.

Those are the standard charges. Special Infrastructure Contributions in growth areas sit on top and are set at half the anticipated infrastructure cost, ranging from about $10,000 to more than $50,000 a dwelling depending on what the development uses. In Queensland the charge is capped near $31,000 a lot outside Priority Development Areas, and exceeds it inside several of them.

The industry position is that these charges, combined with stamp duty, GST, planning charges and compliance costs, now amount to between a third and almost half the price of a new home, with Sydney at the top of that range. That figure comes from the Housing Industry Association and should be read as an industry estimate rather than an independent finding — but no party to the debate disputes that the direction of travel has been upward for thirty years.

11.5 The Commonwealth did offer to pay

It did, and recently. The $2 billion Local Infrastructure Fund, announced as a stream of the Housing Support Program in the 2026–27 Budget, funds local governments and state utility providers to build precisely this — water, power, sewerage and roads to support new housing. The $1 billion National Housing Infrastructure Facility provides loans and grants for the same purpose.

The design detail matters more than the headline. Until 5 January 2026 the Local Infrastructure Fund was notionally allocated to each state and territory. After that date, uncommitted funds became available to eligible projects regardless of where they are. A notional allocation that expires is an allocation that some jurisdictions did not commit in time.

12. Demand

Everything to this point measures supply. Supply only means something against the demand it is measured against, and that is where the public argument is loudest and the numbers are weakest.

12.1 The three components

Demand for dwellings is not population divided by household size, though it is often reported that way. It has three separable parts.

• Natural increase — births less deaths, currently around 100,000 a year and slowly falling.
• Net overseas migration — arrivals less departures, the largest and most volatile component.
• Household formation — how many dwellings a given population divides itself into.

The third is the one that gets missed, and it is not small. The Reserve Bank estimated that falling household size alone added 120,000 households to demand in 2021 — a year in which population growth was close to zero because the borders were shut. People separating, living alone, or staying in the family home after a partner leaves all create dwelling demand without creating a single extra person.

12.2 The population numbers

Australia's population grew by 423,600 in the year to September 2025, reaching 27.7 million — annual growth of 1.6 per cent, of which net overseas migration was 311,000.

At 1 January 2026 there were 2.98 million temporary visa holders in Australia, the highest number on record and 4.24 per cent above the previous year.

Treasury's own forecasts have moved repeatedly: net migration was estimated at 335,000 for 2024–25 and 260,000 for 2025–26, and the planning level for 2026 was lifted to 295,000. Forecasts that move by tens of thousands between budgets are a poor foundation for a five-year construction target.

Western Australia has carried more of this than its share for several years. It was the fastest-growing state through the post-border-reopening period and continues to run above the national rate, which is the demand side of the Perth figures at sections 1, 3 and 11.

12.3 Nobody agrees what demand is

Table 12.1 — Published estimates of annual dwelling demand

Estimates are drawn from published 2025 and 2026 analysis and are not all constructed on the same basis. The Council figure is derived from its estimate of approximately 287,000 dwellings of underlying demand across the first eighteen months of the Accord period.

The Housing Industry Association's summary of its own position is that Australia is trying to fit 11 million households into 10 million homes, and that more than 250,000 homes were needed last year against 196,000 commenced. It is an industry body with an interest in higher build volumes, and the estimate should be read with that in mind — but the Council, which has no such interest, also puts demand above supply in every year of the Accord.

12.5 People per dwelling

Average household size in Australia was 2.5 people at the 2021 Census, down from 2.6 in 2016. It was 4.5 in 1910, about 2.9 in the mid-1980s and close to 2.6 by the late 1990s. It was flat from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s and has declined again through the 2020s.

26 per cent of Australian households contained one person in 2021, against 24 per cent in 2016 and 18 per cent in 1981. The most common household size is two people. In the greater capital cities lone-person households were 24.4 per cent of the total.

Of people living alone, 55 per cent were women and 45 per cent men. Half of the women living alone were aged 65 or older, against one third of the men.

A fall of 0.1 in average household size across a population of 27.7 million implies demand for approximately a further one million dwellings at constant population. The Reserve Bank estimate at section 12.1 measures the same effect over a single year.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics projects between 13.3 and 13.9 million households by 2046 on its medium population series, an increase of 3.3 to 3.9 million on 2021.

13. Home ownership and mortgages

13.1 Tenure

At the 2021 Census Australia had 10.8 million occupied private dwellings. Of those, approximately 3.8 million (35 per cent) were owned with a mortgage, 3.36 million (31 per cent) were owned outright, and 3.32 million (30.6 per cent) were rented.

Households owning outright and households with a mortgage were roughly equal in number around 2003. Since then the number carrying a mortgage has exceeded the number owning outright.

13.2 Loan size by state

The average new owner-occupier home loan in Australia was $735,000 in the March 2026 quarter. It was $660,000 a year earlier, an increase of $75,000 in twelve months, and $402,000 in the March 2016 quarter.

Table 13.1 — Average new owner-occupier loan and monthly repayment, by jurisdiction

Loan sizes are ABS lending indicators for owner-occupier dwellings, March 2026 quarter. Repayments are Canstar estimates for May 2026 on a 30-year principal and interest term. New South Wales records the highest average loan and Tasmania the lowest. Figures for jurisdictions not listed were not confirmed to the same standard.

By loan type, the average investor loan was $709,000, the average first home buyer loan $614,000, and the average owner-occupier refinance $603,000.

The average monthly repayment nationally was $4,613 in May 2026, approximately $1,065 a week or $55,356 a year, and up about $500 since the start of that year.

13.3 Interest rates

Mortgage interest rates do not vary by state. Lenders price nationally, so the variation between jurisdictions at section 13.2 is a function of loan size rather than rate.

The average rate on outstanding owner-occupier loans fell to approximately 2.63 per cent by mid-2021, rose above 6 per cent by mid-2024, and had eased to 5.62 per cent by February 2026. Rates on newly written loans were 5.61 per cent in the same month.

The average variable rate on new owner-occupier loans was 5.93 per cent at the end of March 2026, having risen from the preceding month. Investor loans have carried rates approximately 0.20 to 0.30 percentage points above comparable owner-occupier loans throughout the cycle.

Australian households required 45.0 per cent of income to service a new mortgage on average, against 29.6 per cent in 2020 and 50.3 per cent across 2024–25.

13.4 First home buyers

New first home buyer loans rose 6.8 per cent in the December 2025 quarter to 31,783, the largest quarterly increase since the end of 2023, following the expansion of the federal 5 per cent deposit scheme and the introduction of Help to Buy.

The average first home buyer loan rose 8.5 per cent in that quarter to $607,624, and by approximately 13 per cent over the year against 10.5 per cent for loans overall.

13.5 Investors, and what they hold

The Reserve Bank's analysis of linked taxation and census records puts the number of individual housing investors at 2.3 million as at 2022–23, approximately 10 per cent of the working-age population. Investment properties account for around 20 per cent of the dwelling stock.

Australian Taxation Office statistics for 2020–21 record 2,245,539 individuals owning an investment property — about 20 per cent of the country's 11.4 million taxpayers — holding approximately 3.25 million investment properties between them.

Table 13.2 — Investment property holdings, share of investors

Australian Taxation Office taxation statistics. Shares do not sum to 100 per cent because holdings of three and four properties are not shown. The Reserve Bank's 2022–23 figures are consistent, at approximately 70 per cent holding one property.

Of the 30 per cent of investors holding more than one property, that group owns approximately half of all investment properties. The share of investors owning more than one has risen by 7 percentage points over the past two decades.

Set against section 13.1: of 10.8 million occupied private dwellings, 3.36 million were owned outright, 3.8 million were owned with a mortgage, and 3.32 million were rented.

14. Regional Australia

Every figure to this point is a capital city figure. Regional Australia holds a different stock, at different prices, under different constraints.

14.1 Prices

The median dwelling value across regional Australia was $765,769 in May 2026, against $1,031,838 across the combined capital cities.

Growth in individual regional centres has run well above the capitals. In Western Australia, Albany recorded the strongest annual growth of any regional centre at 24.4 per cent, to $750,000. Busselton's median passed $1 million, up 14.3 per cent in twelve months. Karratha house prices rose 31.8 per cent over the year.

14.2 Vacancy

Regional vacancy rates sit at or below capital city levels across the eastern seaboard and well below them in resource centres.

Table 14.1 — Rental vacancy rates, selected regional centres

December 2025 and early 2026 readings. The Real Estate Institute of Australia treats 3.0 per cent as a balanced rental market. One further estimate places Albury's vacancy at approximately 0.5 per cent on a different measurement basis and date; the figures above are the agency series.

14.3 Albury and Wodonga

The twin cities show the pattern in one place, either side of a state border.

Albury recorded a median house price of $668,000 in the December 2025 quarter and a median vacant land price of $280,000, with annual growth of 7.7 per cent for houses and 9.8 per cent for units. House sales fell 7.4 per cent to 315 and unit sales fell 35.7 per cent to 36. Approximately $360.3 million of new projects were due to commence in 2026.

Wodonga recorded a median house price of $649,000 and a median vacant land price of $235,000, with annual growth of 10.9 per cent for houses and 6.8 per cent for land. House sales rose 18.6 per cent to 261. Land sales fell 38.2 per cent to 63.

Falling sales alongside rising prices is the signature of undersupply rather than weak demand: fewer transactions because there is less to buy, at higher prices because more buyers are competing for it.

14.4 Regional supply constraints

The Housing Industry Association's 2026 Small Business Conditions survey records regional small building businesses warning that shortages will worsen without action on planning delays, workforce shortages and compliance costs.

Regional builders operate at smaller scale, over longer distances, with thinner trade availability and fewer suppliers than metropolitan firms. The apprenticeship measures at section 7 and the insolvency conditions at section 8 apply to them on the same terms.

The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council expects the weakest delivery against Accord shares in New South Wales, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and projects the national shortage to worsen by a further 79,000 dwellings over the five years to 2028–29.

15. Western Australia

Western Australia carries the sharpest version of the national problem. Population growth ran at 2.2 per cent in the year to June, the strongest of the mainland states, against a construction industry already at capacity.

The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia attributes Perth's prices to what its president calls a significant imbalance between supply and demand. That is not a controversial diagnosis. It is the same one every party accepts.

The Secret Harbour corridor is a working example of what that imbalance produces. More than 25,000 people live across Karnup, Singleton, Golden Bay and Secret Harbour. The Karnup railway station was promised at the 2017 state election and still has no construction timeline, while land in the precinct has been offered to developers in exchange for building it.

Housing and infrastructure are being sequenced in the wrong order — dwellings first, transport afterwards — which is how a growth corridor becomes car-dependent by default rather than by choice.

16. What the forecasters expect

Nobody with access to the data expects the target to be met.

• Master Builders Australia forecasts a shortfall of between 166,000 and 204,000 homes.
• The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council's central forecast is closer to 262,000 short.
• The most optimistic industry forecast delivers 83 to 86 per cent of the target.

The Council's own assessment is that at current building rates 1.2 million homes will be reached between June and September 2030 — a year to fifteen months after the deadline, and only if nothing else goes wrong.

The position, stated plainly: every level of government agreed to a number that the industry told them at the time it could not reach, no government is responsible for any particular house, the constraint that decides the outcome is a workforce nobody funded, and the programs added since have mostly increased what buyers can pay. Perth's median passed a million dollars while that was happening.

This is the position as at July 2026. What Sovereign Australia proposes in response is set out separately.

17. Sources

1. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Building Activity, Australia, March 2026 quarter — 307,635 dwellings completed and 331,903 commenced in the first 21 months of the Accord period against 420,000 required; 43,816 completions and 48,012 commencements in the March 2026 quarter; 45,410 completions in the September 2024 quarter; and 243,864 dwellings under construction at 31 March 2026, the highest number on record. Cited in section 5 and 6.4.
2. National Housing Accord, agreed 2022 between the Commonwealth, state, territory and local governments, unions and industry — the target of 1.2 million well-located homes completed between July 2024 and June 2029, equal to 240,000 a year or 60,000 a quarter, and the $3 billion New Homes Bonus paid to jurisdictions exceeding their share. Cited in section 4.
3. National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, State of the Housing System 2026 and Quarterly Report, March 2026 — the 17 per cent rise in quarterly building approvals since the Accord began, the estimate that the target is reached between June and September 2030 on current building rates, the central shortfall forecast of approximately 262,000 dwellings, and affordability at its lowest recorded level. Cited in sections 6 and 7.
4. Master Builders Australia — the forecast shortfall of 166,000 to 204,000 homes against the Accord target, and the association's assessment of the 2026 Budget as containing broken promises, tax rises and cuts to apprenticeship funding. Cited in section 7.
5. Statements of the Minister for Housing — the estimate that 90,000 additional construction workers are required to meet residential construction demand. Cited in section 7.2.
6. Cotality, Perth home value index to June 2026 — a median dwelling value of $1,046,551, growth of 0.7 per cent in the month, 2.0 per cent in the quarter and 23.9 per cent over the year, and total listings up 16.7 per cent year on year with a median 14 days to sell. Cited in section 3.
7. Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, 2026 market forecast and market updates — the median Perth house rent of $720 a week and apartment rent of $690, the record $700 house rent first reached in August 2025, the vacancy rate of approximately 2 to 2.5 per cent, and the president's attribution of Perth prices to a significant imbalance between supply and demand alongside population growth of 2.2 per cent in the year to June. Cited in section 3 and 5.
8. Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Federal measures to tackle Australia's housing challenges explained (2026) — the overview of Commonwealth housing programs including the Housing Australia Future Fund, Help to Buy, the Home Guarantee Scheme and the New Homes Bonus. Cited in section 6.
9. Sovereign Australia Party, What We Stand For and the Federal Platform §2.5 — the party's existing housing commitments, against which the assessment in this memo is not a substitute. Cited in section 17.
10. National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, Quarterly Report, March 2026 — the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction estimates of when each state and territory will reach its share of the Accord target, the note that shares are implied population-share targets rather than negotiated quotas, and the Australian Capital Territory's 117 per cent rise in dwelling approvals against Victoria's 1 per cent fall in the year to January 2026. Cited in section 2.
11. New South Wales Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Housing targets — the state's commitment of 377,000 new well-located homes by 2029 under the Accord, distributed as five-year completion targets across 43 councils. Cited in section 2.
12. MacroBusiness analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics building activity data — New South Wales tracking approximately 40 per cent and Queensland approximately 32 per cent behind their required run rates after eighteen months, against Victoria at approximately 10 per cent. Cited in section 2.
13. SQM Research, monthly rental vacancy series to June 2026 — a national vacancy rate of 1.3 per cent with 39,229 dwellings vacant, the 1.0 per cent reading in March 2026, the pre-pandemic decade average of 2.5 per cent, annual rental growth of 8.1 per cent, and capital city rates of Darwin 0.3 per cent, Perth 0.6, Adelaide 0.7, Brisbane 0.9, Sydney 1.4 and Melbourne 1.6. Cited in section 3.
14. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Wage Price Index — annual wage growth of 3.4 per cent, against which rental growth is compared. Cited in section 3.
15. Australian Government Treasury and the Department of Finance — the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund established 1 November 2023 and disbursing $500 million a year to 2028–29 toward 20,000 social and 20,000 affordable homes; the $2 billion Social Housing Accelerator paid to the states in 2023 for approximately 4,000 homes; the $9.3 billion National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness running five years from 2024; the $3 billion New Homes Bonus; the $500 million Housing Support Program; the $2 billion Local Infrastructure Fund; and the $1 billion National Housing Infrastructure Facility. Cited in section 6.
16. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Housing assistance in Australia 2026, drawing on Productivity Commission data — Commonwealth Rent Assistance expenditure of $6.4 billion in 2024–25 against $5.7 billion the previous year; state and territory net recurrent expenditure on social housing of $5.9 billion and capital expenditure of $4.9 billion in 2024–25. Cited in section 6.
17. Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and Ministers' media releases — the Key Apprenticeship Program housing construction stream from July 2025, paying apprentices $10,000 in five instalments and employers $5,000 extended to December 2026, funded at approximately $627 million over four years from 2025–26; more than 25,000 commencements in ten months, 17,729 apprentices receiving payments in early 2026, and more than 4,000 commencements in the first two months of 2026. Cited in section 7.
18. Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Federal measures to tackle Australia's housing challenges explained (2026) — Fee-Free TAFE from 2023 and the $85.2 million allocated in the 2026 Budget to accelerate trades skills assessments for skilled migrants, with the estimate that entry to the workforce could be shortened by up to six months. Cited in section 7.
19. 2026 Federal Budget measures and industry responses, including the Housing Industry Association and Master Builders Australia — the restriction of employer incentives to small and medium enterprises and Group Training Organisations from 1 January 2026, the removal of incentives for non-priority occupations, the halving of priority support from $5,000 to $2,500, the $75.1 million trade skills assessment system and the $5.6 million overseas-trained recognition program. Cited in section 7.2.
20. Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Insolvency Statistics, Series 1, published 13 July 2026 with data to 28 June 2026 — 3,435 construction companies entering external administration for the first time in 2025–26 against 3,596 the previous year, a fall of 4.5 per cent and the first annual decline since the post-pandemic wave; the preceding annual movements of 72, 34 and 21 per cent; and the jurisdictional split of 1,522 in New South Wales and 984 in Victoria, together approximately 73 per cent of the national total. Cited in section 8.
21. Industry analysis of ASIC insolvency data, including CreditorWatch and sector commentary — construction accounting for approximately one in four company insolvencies nationally; the fixed-price contract mechanism, illustrated by a contract signed at $450,000 in 2021 costing $630,000 to deliver; the accumulation of tax debt, deferred superannuation and stretched supplier terms among surviving firms; and the collapses of Porter Davis Homes with approximately 1,700 homes in progress and Lloyd Group affecting 59 projects worth more than $350 million. Cited in sections 8.1 and 8.2.
22. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 2021, and analysis by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and id. Consulting — 1,043,776 unoccupied private dwellings, approximately 10 per cent of the national stock and slightly below the 2016 proportion; the determination of occupancy by returned census form; the 647,000 dwellings sold in 2021; the two million Australians owning a property other than their home; and the concentration of unoccupied dwellings in holiday districts including Robe, Queenscliffe and the Central Highlands. Cited in sections 9 and 9.1.
23. Prosper Australia, Speculative Vacancies series, using Victorian water consumption records — approximately 1.5 per cent of Melbourne houses long-term vacant in 2023, and roughly half of the city's census-recorded vacancies representing genuine long-term vacancy, in the order of 82,000 dwellings; and the finding that census counts are a poor measure of vacancy. Cited in section 9.2.
24. New South Wales Parliamentary Research Service, Vacant housing: data, policies and developments (July 2025) — total short and long-term vacant housing in New South Wales estimated at 298,510 in 2021, with genuine long-term vacancy between 15,000 (0.5 per cent of dwellings) and 43,185 (1.4 per cent), and the observation that long-term vacancy is poorly understood because of the lack of data. Cited in section 9.2.
25. Victorian State Revenue Office and the Premier of Victoria — the vacant residential land tax operating since 1 January 2018 at 1 per cent of capital improved value on homes unoccupied for more than six months, its extension to vacant residential land in inner and middle Melbourne from 1 January 2026, and the compliance investigation of five apartment buildings identifying 177 liable properties across 337 assessments for the 2019 to 2024 land tax years. Cited in section 9.3.
26. City of Vancouver empty homes tax evaluation — $231 million raised between 2018 and 2020 and a fall in properties assessed as vacant from 8,920 to 6,556 as owners rented, sold or occupied them. Cited in section 9.3.
27. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Building Activity, Australia, March 2026 quarter — 23,730 house completions against 16,936 other dwelling completions, with house completions down 5.7 per cent and other dwellings up 13 per cent over the year. Cited in section 10.1.
28. Industry analysis of the apartment development pipeline — the pre-sale, buyer hesitancy and construction finance deadlock, and its effect on the first two years of the Accord's apartment pipeline. Cited in section 10.1.
29. Foreign Investment Review Board, Guidance Note 6: Residential Land (version 3, March 2025) and the Australian Taxation Office, foreign investment and vacancy fee guidance current to July 2026 — the $0 threshold for residential land, the prohibition on foreign purchase of established dwellings from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2029, the channelling of investment into new and near-new dwellings, the four-year development condition on vacant land, the Register of Foreign Ownership of Australian Assets, and the annual vacancy fee applying where a dwelling is not occupied or genuinely available for rent for 183 days, set since April 2024 at double the original application fee and payable where a return is not lodged on time. Cited in section 10.2.
30. Analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics and industry lot price data for the decade to September 2025 — the rise in median lot values across the six state capitals and the corresponding rise in price per square metre, alongside the decline in median lot sizes in every capital except Brisbane. Cited in section 11.1.
31. Urban Development Institute of Australia (Western Australia), Urban Development Index, December 2025 and March 2026 quarters — the average price of new land in Greater Perth reaching $404,150 and then a record $424,025, up 18.3 per cent over the year and 78 per cent over five years; 386 lots on the market at 31 March 2026 against a five-year rolling average of 1,237 and the second lowest count since September 2018; and 1,002 lots sold in the North West Corridor at an average of $420,605. Cited in section 11.2.
32. Western Australian residential construction cost estimates, 2026 — the cost of building a new house in Perth at approximately $3,000 to $4,000 per square metre against about $1,000 per square metre in 2020. Cited in section 11.1.
33. New South Wales Housing and Productivity Contribution and Special Infrastructure Contributions, and Queensland infrastructure charges — the Greater Sydney base rate of $12,000 per new dwelling lot discounted to $9,000, $10,000 per medium and high density dwelling, and $8,000 per lot in regional New South Wales; Special Infrastructure Contributions set at 50 per cent of anticipated infrastructure cost and ranging from approximately $10,000 to more than $50,000 a dwelling; and the Queensland cap near $31,000 a lot outside Priority Development Areas. Cited in section 11.4.
34. Housing Industry Association research on government charges in new housing — the estimate that taxes, levies, contributions, stamp duty, GST, planning charges and compliance costs together comprise between approximately one third and one half of the price of a new home depending on the city, with Sydney at the upper end. Cited in section 11.4 and attributed in-page as an industry estimate.
35. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Housing assistance in Australia 2026, and Australian Government budget papers — the $2 billion Local Infrastructure Fund announced as a stream of the Housing Support Program in the 2026–27 Budget for local governments and state utility providers to deliver water, power, sewerage and roads for new housing, and the notional per-jurisdiction allocation that applied until 5 January 2026, after which uncommitted funds became available to eligible projects regardless of location. Cited in section 11.5.
36. Australian Bureau of Statistics, National, state and territory population, and analysis of the September 2025 release — population growth of 423,600 to 27.7 million, annual growth of 1.6 per cent, net overseas migration of 311,000, and 2.98 million temporary visa holders at 1 January 2026, the highest on record and 4.24 per cent above the previous year. Cited in section 12.2.
37. Reserve Bank of Australia estimates of household size, cited in PEXA and Longview research — the finding that declining household size alone added approximately 120,000 households to dwelling demand in 2021 despite negligible population growth in that year. Cited in section 12.1.
38. Australian Treasury migration forecasts and AMP Econosights analysis — net overseas migration estimated at 335,000 for 2024–25 and 260,000 for 2025–26 with the 2026 planning level lifted to 295,000, and AMP's estimate of underlying dwelling demand averaging just under 180,000 a year. Cited in sections 12.2 and 12.3.
39. Housing Industry Association, Beyond Population ÷ 2.5: Understanding Housing Demand in Australia (June 2026) — the estimate that more than 250,000 homes were required in the preceding year against 196,000 commencements, and the characterisation of Australia attempting to accommodate 11 million households in 10 million homes. Cited in section 12.3 and attributed in-page as an industry estimate.
40. Australian Institute of Family Studies and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 2021 — average household size of 2.5 people, down from 2.6 in 2016 and 4.5 in 1910; 26 per cent of households containing one person against 24 per cent in 2016 and 18 per cent in 1981; two people as the most common household size; 24.4 per cent lone-person households in the greater capital cities; and the composition of people living alone by sex and age. Cited in section 12.5.
41. Reserve Bank of Australia, A New Measure of Average Household Size (Bulletin, March 2023), and Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household and Family Projections, Australia, 2021–2046 — the decline in average household size from approximately 2.9 people in the mid-1980s, and the projection of between 13.3 and 13.9 million households by 2046 on the medium population series. Cited in section 12.5.
42. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 2021 — 10.8 million occupied private dwellings, of which approximately 3.8 million (35 per cent) owned with a mortgage, 3.36 million (31 per cent) owned outright and 3.32 million (30.6 per cent) rented, and the crossover point around 2003 at which mortgaged households began to exceed outright owners. Cited in section 13.1.
43. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Lending Indicators, March 2026 quarter — an average new owner-occupier loan of $735,000 nationally against $660,000 a year earlier and $402,000 in the March 2016 quarter; $860,000 in New South Wales and $521,000 in Tasmania; and average loan sizes of $709,000 for investors, $614,000 for first home buyers and $603,000 for owner-occupier refinancing. Cited in section 13.2.
44. Canstar mortgage repayment estimates, May 2026, and Reserve Bank of Australia and APRA lending rate series — an average monthly repayment of $4,613 nationally, $5,472 in New South Wales, $3,228 in the Northern Territory and $3,159 in Tasmania; the average rate on outstanding owner-occupier loans of approximately 2.63 per cent in mid-2021, above 6 per cent by mid-2024 and 5.62 per cent by February 2026; new loans at 5.61 per cent in the same month and an average new variable rate of 5.93 per cent at the end of March 2026; and the 0.20 to 0.30 percentage point margin on investor lending. Cited in sections 13.2 and 13.3.
45. Mortgage market analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics lending data — the requirement for 45.0 per cent of household income to service a new mortgage against 29.6 per cent in 2020 and 50.3 per cent across 2024–25; and first home buyer loans rising 6.8 per cent in the December 2025 quarter to 31,783 with an average loan size of $607,624, following expansion of the federal 5 per cent deposit scheme and the introduction of Help to Buy. Cited in sections 13.3 and 13.4.
46. Reserve Bank of Australia, Insights From New Data on Australian Housing Investors (Bulletin, May 2026), using linked administrative and census data — 2.3 million individual housing investors as at 2022–23, approximately 10 per cent of the working-age population; investment properties comprising around 20 per cent of the dwelling stock; approximately 70 per cent of investors holding a single property; and the 30 per cent holding multiple properties owning around half of all investment properties, a share that has risen 7 percentage points over two decades. Cited in section 13.5.
47. Australian Taxation Office taxation statistics, 2020–21 — 2,245,539 individuals owning an investment property, approximately 20 per cent of 11.4 million taxpayers, holding approximately 3.25 million investment properties; and the distribution of holdings at 71 per cent owning one property, 19 per cent owning two, and under 1 per cent owning five or six or more. Cited in section 13.5.
48. Cotality and Real Estate Institute of Western Australia quarterly data, 2026 — a regional Australian median dwelling value of $765,769 against $1,031,838 across the combined capitals; Albany at $750,000 after annual growth of 24.4 per cent, the strongest of any regional centre; Busselton above $1 million after 14.3 per cent growth; Karratha house prices up 31.8 per cent with a rental vacancy rate of 0.1 per cent at the end of April. Cited in sections 14.1 and 14.2.
49. PRD Research, Albury Property Market Update and Wodonga Property Market Update, first half 2026 — Albury median house price $668,000 and median vacant land $280,000 with annual growth of 7.7 and 9.8 per cent, house sales down 7.4 per cent to 315 and unit sales down 35.7 per cent to 36, a vacancy rate of 1.5 per cent and approximately $360.3 million of projects commencing in 2026; Wodonga median house price $649,000 and median vacant land $235,000 with annual growth of 10.9 and 6.8 per cent, house sales up 18.6 per cent to 261, land sales down 38.2 per cent to 63, and a vacancy rate of 1.1 per cent. Cited in sections 14.2 and 14.3.
50. Housing Industry Association, Small Business Conditions survey 2026, and regional vacancy data for the Hunter and Illawarra — regional small builders identifying planning delays, workforce shortages and compliance costs as the constraints on regional delivery, and vacancy rates of 1.5 per cent in the Hunter and 1.7 per cent in the Illawarra. Cited in sections 14.2 and 14.4.
51. National Housing Supply and Affordability Council forecasts — the expectation of weakest delivery against Accord shares in New South Wales, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and a national shortage worsening by a further 79,000 dwellings over the five years to 2028–29; and the estimate that the average renter spends 33.4 per cent of pre-tax income on rent. Cited in sections 3 and 14.4.