Country and coastal towns feel the pressure as city exodus continues
The Regional Australia Institute says the nation is unprepared for this shift with housing supply a key issue
The Regional Australia Institute says the nation is unprepared for this shift with housing supply a key issue
More Australians are choosing a life in the regions as local employment opportunities grow and the work-from-home era enables young families to leave expensive metropolitan housing markets for a new lifestyle on the coast or in the country where homes are more affordable.
The Regional Australia Institute (RAI) estimates 3.5 million Australians would like to set up a new life in the regions but we are unprepared for this population shift. The RAI says many regional towns are already struggling to meet the needs of their growing populations, especially in terms of housing supply and essential services like childcare and education.
“A significant societal transformation is underway in Australia,” said RAI CEO Liz Ritchie. “More people are choosing a life in the regions, and metropolitan to regional relocations remain almost 12 percent above the pre-COVID average. With all those additional people calling regional Australia home, we must now ensure that they are able to access the services they need to lead safe, productive, fulfilling lives and contribute to the nation’s success.”
The Federal Government’s newly released State of Australia’s Regions 2024 report reveals key insights as to how the country’s regional areas are changing. It notes significant population increases since the pandemic, especially around coastal cities, and strong economic growth. This is creating more jobs — so much so that regional areas are finding it difficult to fill vacancies.
Job advertisements in regional Australia more than doubled over the four years to October 2023 amid the best three years of agricultural, fisheries and forestry production on record. The tourism industry has also expanded, with more than 100,000 tourism-related businesses now operational across the regions. This is providing a direct economic boost to other local businesses as more visitors flood in. The report also notes that Australia’s net-zero ambitions will require 213,000 new clean energy jobs by 2033, and more of them will be in the regions than the cities.
Ms Ritchie said regional housing supply constraints are already “putting a handbrake on our nation’s growth and prosperity”. Regional areas have as much of a supply issue as the cities, with home values soaring at a greater rate than the capitals, and rental vacancies just as low at an average of 0.8 percent, according to the latest data from Domain. The RAI says that between March 2020 and December 2023, the median value of regional dwellings grew by 54.2 percent from $392,802 to $605,780. By comparison, capital city dwelling values increased by 29.3 percent from $643,540 to $832,193.
“While it is still more affordable to buy in the regions, for now, there is no third option if locals or metro-movers are priced out of the market, and supply fails to meet demand,” Ms Ritchie said.
Last Friday, RAI co-hosted a National Regional Housing Summit in Canberra attended by 300 industry insiders and government figures including the Federal Minister for Housing. The RAI said one of the issues highlighted was the need for housing diversity, especially medium-density developments. RAI analysis reveals that apartments make up just 2-3 percent of the total housing stock in some regional markets compared to more than 42 percent in metropolitan areas.
“Our regional communities are crying out for one- and two-bedroom properties. Workers need easily accessible and affordable accommodation, older people want to leave their large properties for easier-to-maintain apartments, and a lot more people could get into the property market if there were more entry-level options on the market,” Ms Ritchie said.
“In the NSW city of Dubbo, construction is underway on a 15-storey apartment block. This isn’t the sort of development you’d normally expect in an inland community, but it shows that demand for this type of housing is certainly there,” she said.
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The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
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.”
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