National Cabinet announcements ‘no silver bullet’ for housing crisis: REIA

Hayden Groves, president at the Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA), has asked for further clarification from the government around the reforms targeting strengthening renters’ rights, especially given his belief the 30 per cent of Australians who rent receive sufficiently strong rights under state and territory regulations.

“It’s unclear what a national renter’s rights plan sets out to achieve,” he said.

“If it’s uniformity of rental legislation and experience, including efficiencies like a National Bonds Board, bring it on,” he declared, adding that “this should be extended to other areas of real estate practice like licensing and industry standards.”

Mr Groves explained such actions should present the government with an opportunity to “weed out practices and policies that inhibit rental supply and discourage investors away from the market like stamp duty, land taxes, and some tenancy laws.”

He noted the industry’s general consensus is “renters need more help,” but wondered whether increases to schemes such as the Commonwealth Rent Assistance are perhaps “real investment National Cabinet should be turning their attention to.”

“One has to question what exactly a renter’s rights plan aims to do at National Cabinet level, and we hope it is an opportunity to help enable rental supply and provide improvements to wildly disparate real estate laws across the country,” he said.

With news breaking earlier this week that Australia’s build-to-rent (BTR) sector is set to receive an investment boost of $16 billion, the REIA welcomed concessions offered to the BTR industry, which should increase the asset classes’ viability.

“We welcome [the] proposal for increased depreciation allowances to make BTR more viable but need to be careful not to have an adverse impact on ordinary property investors’ decisions, who have been doing the heavy lifting in the supply of rental properties,” Mr Groves said.

He described the task of getting more “ordinary Australian property investors” back into the rental market as a “critical part of the solution,” but added that “yet we do not see any mention of them on the National Cabinet communique.”

He described the reforms presented by the National Cabinet as a “start” before calling for greater engagement with the wider industry to find “unilateral solutions to housing supply.”

“We need to put all options on the table when it comes to housing supply including stamp duty reform, incentives for mum and dad investors to come back to private rentals in force and sort out the planning and regulation backlogs in each state and territory,” he said.

Mr Groves concluded the REIA “will continue to work with National Cabinet and Australia’s Housing Ministers to provide impactful ideas to deliver more homes.”