The suburbs where we’re building the most new homes

Australia is in the midst of a housing crisis with supply challenges and demand pressures leading to a clogged pipeline of unfinished new home builds and approvals per capita languishing at decade-lows. There aren’t enough tradies to finish the homes under construction in normal timeframes. Meantime, construction costs have risen by 40 percent since late 2019 and contributed to dramatically higher insolvencies among building companies. High interest rates and lengthy approval processes have also prompted some developers to shelve plans for new projects altogether.

All of these challenges mean the National Housing Accord, with its ambition to build 1.2 million well-located homes over the next five years, will begin shortly amid very difficult conditions. However, the Federal and state and territory governments have agreed to the plan and plenty of money was allocated in the recent Federal Budget to get the program officially underway from 1 July.

Meanwhile, the Housing Industry Association (HIA) has published a report revealing the areas that are in line to receive the most new homes soonest, based on the value of approvals during FY23. The HIA has paired this data with population figures to identify the growth hot spots across Australia.

HIA economist Maurice Tapang said the top 20 hot spots for new approvals and above-average population growth were predominantly suburbs with greenfield developments. These developments require state governments to fund and build supporting infrastructure such as power lines, sewage and water pipes, roads and footpaths to service thousands of new residential lots.

“This is testament to the role that greenfield developments play in supporting the growth of our cities,” Mr Tapang said. “The drivers of housing demand are population and economic growth. Supporting population growth will require supplying adequate homes, which will entail providing the necessary infrastructure and land supply to grow our cities.

“As the high cost of the typical house and land package in some of our capital cities becomes out of reach to the typical income earner, it is important for policymakers to facilitate the supply needed to fill housing shortages. In order to build the Australian Government’s target of 1.2 million homes, there needs to be a healthy balance between greenfield and infill developments to support building well-located homes of all types.”

Australia’s top 6 home building and population hot spots

Box Hill – Nelson

In NSW, the top new home building hot spot is Box Hill – Nelson in Sydney’s Hills District, with $597 million in approvals and population growth of 26.5% in FY23.

Fraser Rise – Plumpton

Fraser Rise – Plumpton in Melbourne’s west was Victoria’s biggest growth hot spot, with $660.1 million in approvals along with 26.4% population growth.

Marsden Park – Shanes Park

Located in Sydney’s Blacktown area in the western suburbs, Marsden Park – Shanes Park booked $370 million in approvals and 19.7% population growth.

Tarneit – North

Located in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Tarneit – North recorded $384.3 million in new home building approvals and 18.9% population growth.

Rockbank – Mount Cottrell

Also in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Rockbank – Mount Cottrell had $593.4 million in approvals and 18.7% population growth.

Chambers Flat – Logan Reserve

Chambers Flat – Logan Reserve in the City of Logan, south of Brisbane, was Queensland’s biggest growth hot spot with $264.6 million in approvals and 18.4% population growth.

Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.

Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.

Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.

Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.

Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.

“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.

Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.

Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.

In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.

Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.

Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.

Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.

In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .

The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .

“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”