The building industry’s peak body is applauding the success of the HomeBuilder scheme, which is expected to support $18 billion worth of residential construction and renovation projects.
“Without HomeBuilder thousands of small builder and tradie businesses would have gone under, and hundreds of thousands of jobs would have been lost,” she said.
New home sales have nearly doubled during December to the highest level in almost 20 years as buyers sought to secure the full grant before the original end-of-year deadline.
Introduced in June, the scheme offered $25,000 grants for the building of new homes or renovations. It has been extended by three months as a $15,000 grant.
Wawn noted that HomeBuilder was a star component of the federal governments economic recovery strategy and will generate $50 billion worth of economic activity throughout Australia. This, she said, is proof that a stronger building industry means a stronger economy.
The latest new home sales report by the Housing Industry Association (HIA) found that December was the second strongest month of new home sales since they began reporting on it 20 years ago. This result is only exceeded by March 2001.
The report also found that new home sales in 2020 saw a 32.5 percent increase from 2019 which Lillicrap described as “an exceptional result given the nature of the pandemic and the effect that it has had on the broader economy.”
However, while the Federal government scheme has been a success Urban Taskforce Chief Executive Officer Tom Forrest said that it had also highlighted the appalling performance of planning approvals in states like New South Wales.
“Investment in this sector has a massive multiplier effect because property design, engineering, construction, marketing and sales are all highly labour intensive,” he said.
“The building materials are largely locally sourced. So the money on this sector is spent in Australia, it stays in Australia and flows on ... thus creating more local jobs,” he said.
