photo credit: waferboard
The Urban Development Institute says there are currently fewer than 1400 blocks of land for sale in Perth.
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But, the Real Estate Institute believes there are a lot of speculators sitting on land waiting for prices to improve before releasing them for sale.
The UDIA is concerned that with 1200 migrants visiting Perth each week, the 1400 blocks of land for sale is insufficient to address affordability.
With only 7 auctions last weekend and 20 on Feb 21, for example, it seems that the property downturn in Perth is still in effect. How many other blocks are being withheld and aren’t up for ransom at present?
With higher populations, the demand for land will rise. The REI rightly states that many speculators are sitting on idle blocks waiting for money to grow on trees.
Higher populations should encourage development upwards, not outward. Prime locations become more valuable, ensuring that owners have to make their land more productive to warrant the investment.
The issue is that with more and more builders turning to land banking as a means to an ends – free skiing in Aspen funded by you the taxpayer, you the worker – there is less motivation to build upwards.
This trend will hit the Rudd Government this election year. The rush to remove democratic rights of appeal for local communities in a bid to counter the private sector’s preference for land banking, may well cost some Victorian ALP members their seats.
When will government’s of all persuasions look lobbyists in the eyes and tell them to disappear? Land banking is not only forcing our mortgage costs through the roof, but it is robbing communities of our best and brightest people. How many GP’s have given up their practice for such speculative activity?
2 Comments on “Drip Drip Land Supply”
The announcement of new land ‘search and seizure’ laws yesterday came as no surprise and came into place today in Sydney, when the state government announced they could force to buy up land next to train stations and rail networks to develop high density multi-story flats. It reminds me of Hockey’s comments that same day on radio on our ‘threat to Liberty’ and the excess of Police powers ‘search and seize’, and that citizens should be able to go about their business without police or gov obstructions, and that governments had to much interference in peoples lives but this time its the Land stassi, that want to make an autocratic and dictatorial offer you cant refuse, so much and so long to democracy when the lobbyists and developers knock on your door, the opposite result is land hording with thousands of vacant investment property’s next to prime public transport full of retiree’s and old Gran’s who never go’s to the city obstructing developers and young people who work in the city and need high density flats close to public transport, OK, sorry im being a bit predudice towards the old and infirm, my latest ‘Me culpa’!
How much of the FHBG stimulus, was GIFT money from foreign investor’s nations to the Rudd Government? so as to relax foreign bidding laws here, and create fat profits, as property prices soar, so long as they keep sending the free stimulus cheques, they can keep the laws relaxed, it would be the greatest land banking scandal