The future of regional housing

WATCH: A Regional Australia Institute senior economist speaks on the future of regional housing in Australia

Transcript

00:00I'm Dewar Hopkins and I'm RAI's Senior Lead Ambassador.

00:04And Dewar, we've just been in a panel where you gave us some figures on what housing's

00:09like in regional Australia at the moment.

00:11Could you tell me a bit about that?

00:12Yeah, so there are significant challenges in regional housing markets and specifically

00:19we're looking at housing, the full gamut of non-owner occupier rental housing.

00:25So whether that be at the real sort of crisis, social, affordable end of housing right through

00:31to build to rent, the availability of private rentals, it's that element of housing that

00:39is most challenged in regional communities.

00:42And we know that there's hundreds of thousands of job vacancies and there'll be more coming

00:47up in regional Australia as infrastructure moves.

00:51What kind of came up that you found particularly fascinating in the panel today around solutions

00:55to the housing?

00:57Yeah, so the panel discussion really gave us some innovative solutions to the challenges

01:03that regions face.

01:04They face unique challenges that go to issues of scale, access to finance.

01:09We had a lot of discussions about what modular housing can do to achieve the at-scale needs

01:15that are really required in regions, particularly around those big energy projects and the workforce

01:22accommodation needs associated with those projects.

01:25We also looked at new systems of bringing about community housing.

01:30So there's a wide range of solutions that were really being canvassed in our discussion

01:35today.