When Cath Hart was approached to lead the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, she saw the move as akin to a homecoming.
Growing up, the outgoing Housing Industry Association executive director shadowed her parents as they worked across Far North Queensland.
“My parents were both real estate agents,” Ms Hart told Business News.
“I grew up handing [my dad] core flutes to put in ‘for sale’ signs … going to display homes and trudging through paddocks [thinking] ‘we’re having a hot chicken picnic’ but he was out there working on subdivisions.”
Ms Hart’s parents owned a real estate agency in the Whitsundays, her father was a valuer for the government and her mother worked with the Real Estate Institute of Queensland.
“I have always seen the business side of it and what that looks like … they are very hard-working, even the agents I know now; it’s evenings, weekends,” she said.
At REIWA, Ms Hart will represent 7,500 real estate professionals across the state, advocating for their interests to government and the wider public.
Advocacy roots
Ms Hart worked as a journalist for Brisbane’s Courier Mail for three years in the early 2000s and national daily newspaper The Australian for close to five years.
She headed to WA in 2009 to take up a position in state government media and policy advising roles, and then to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of WA as corporate affairs general manager in 2014.
Her passion for representing members became more prominent in 2016 when she was appointed director of advocacy at CCIWA.
Ms Hart’s time at the chamber also marked a pivot point in her career, with the move from communications into advocacy.
She told Business News she was drawn to representing business for the purpose it served in society.
“I think people that have a crack, take a risk, and create wealth and opportunities for other people are quite extraordinary … and we don’t celebrate them enough in our community,” Ms Hart said.
Though REIWA and HIA are rooted in different segments of the property market, Ms Hart said the two were intrinsically linked.
“My builder members have been teasing me in the last couple of weeks at HIA and saying, ‘You’re going to the second-hand homes market, as opposed to staying with us in the new homes market’,” she said.
“When I think about established and new housing, it’s that housing continuum, from social and affordable housing through to rentals, home ownership and investors.
“While things are really challenging in the new build market residential construction sector, because of all the supply chain issues … the challenges [with] labour shortages, that is connected to what’s happening in the established market, because we’ve got such low rental vacancy rates.
“People aren’t able to get those new homes completed, so they’re still renting.”
Ms Hart said investors were a key part of the solution to the shortage of housing stock in WA.
“One of the things WA needs more than anything at the moment is people who are willing to own a house that they don’t live in, that they’re willing to rent to somebody else, because that takes pressure out of all the other parts of the housing continuum,” she said.
“Private investment is something that’s really important … especially at a time when we have such a big pipeline of work for the new home sector [and] there’s going to be delays in those projects reaching completion.”
Pandemic
Ms Hart clearly recalls early 2020 when COVID took hold globally, and the ripple effect on WA’s residential construction industry.
The sector was coming off a five-year downturn, and housing starts plummeted in the lead-up to COVID.
HIA data shows there were 11,153 detached housing starts and 3,387 unit starts in the December 2019 quarter, compared with 24,429 and 8,376 in March 2015.
HIA used its data to lobby government for a lifeline, which was provided in the form of federal and state housing stimulus.
“It was really challenging … pre-grants, we were in lockdown, seeing horrific scenes out of places like Italy and the US, and everyone was wrapping their heads around what COVID would look like, Ms Hart said.
“In WA, the residential construction sector had come off five years of some of the worst conditions that it had had, some of the lowest amount of starts.
“What that meant is that our trades base had been hollowed out, we didn’t have a good pipeline of trainees and apprentices coming through, a lot of people had left the industry.”
At the time, HIA’s data showed that WA had a pipeline of 12 weeks of residential construction work, which was below the other states, Ms Hart said.
“We knew that each week that went by while display homes were closed … the clock was ticking on us having no more work to go to site,” she said.
With no new jobs coming in, companies could be forced to stand down staff in estimating, scheduling, selection and other pre-construction work.
“There are 64,000 people employed directly in residential construction in WA, let alone all the ancillary services around that and suppliers as well,” Ms Hart said.
“It was really frightening, and people were very concerned about their businesses.
“We used our data to paint this picture and explain to the government that our pipeline was the shortest in the country because of those historically low conditions, and we would be impacted by this before the east coast.”
When the grants arrived, prompting an influx of first homebuyers to commit to new builds, construction companies were flooded with sales.
“It was drinking from the fire hydrant; we went from a historic low to a historic high overnight,” Ms Hart said.
The stimulus was met with criticism from some in the industry for overheating the market, with many builders forced to stop selling new homes to manage the backlog of jobs.
But Ms Hart said the grants acted as a green light for confidence among consumers and across the broader community.
“I’ve always defended those initiatives because I think it’s really easy to forget where we were at the time,” she said.
“We didn’t know how COVID would go in our community, whether we would end up with our hospitals being overrun; we didn’t know what the economic impact would be.”
Ahead
Ms Hart said she felt optimistic about the future of WA’s property market and believed there was plenty of demand for new and established homes.
“Everyone has been concerned about what comes next, have we made a hollow log and brought forward all this demand,” she said.
“My view is there is probably still pent-up demand that becomes a lot more sustainable; it’s not that grant related work.”
REIWA president Damian Collins forecast a 10 per cent rise in house prices in the next 12 months and Ms Hart agreed with that view.
“I think that the Western Australian property sector is at the beginning of the positive cycle,” she said.
At REIWA, Ms Hart plans to build on the legacy the group has created advocating for its members while managing its digital asset in its website.
Outside of REIWA, Ms Hart chairs the Housing Industry Forecasting Group and is a member of the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre Advisory Board.
