Western Australia’s homebuilders are urging the state government to speed up the approvals process for new public housing and provide much-needed work for the residential construction sector.
The Master Builders Association this week revealed it had written to Housing Minister Troy Buswell urging him to bring forward planned public housing construction to support the home-building sector.
MBA director of housing Gavan Forster said the state government’s commitment to forming public-private partnerships to develop new public housing was sound, but concerns remained that the assessment process for these new consortia was holding up construction contracts.
In May, Mr Buswell announced a new government expression-of-interest process to support the building industry at a time when new approvals had fallen.
Mr Buswell said the EOI would provide builders and developers with the chance to work together to bring innovative development proposals for affordable housing to the government.
“The state government has a number of programs designed to improve social and affordable housing but how quickly that’s getting to the marketplace is to be demonstrated,” Mr Forster said.
“If they could bring forward public construction … that should be part of the fine tuning approach the government takes.”
Industry analysts suggest the weak home building sector is an opportunity for the state government to negotiate some very competitive building contracts, but only if it moves quickly.
“Demand from private homebuyers is pretty low so if the government was in there getting this program moving and contracts awarded they would be going into the building market at the right time, and they could get the homes built for pretty competitive prices,” one builder said.
“There are an awful lot of EOI being assessed but very few decisions being made by the government to award contracts … they seem to be having difficulties making the transition.
“And they are fast running out of time in terms of their self-imposed deadlines to get these units built.’’
Mr Buswell revealed the government was currently processing a large number of proposals under the new EOI scheme, which could generate as much as $640 million in residential building activity.
However, he did not provide any firm start date for this building activity, except to say it was expected construction would occur in 2012.
