Corporate News

Bureaucratic red tape was a chief cause of the housing supply and affordability crisis, Villawood Managing Director Rory Costelloe has told the Future Victoria Summit.

Serious cutting of planning demands was needed to boost housing supply, drive competition and help affordability, he said. Cutting the red tape jungle should also be complemented by smarter home design and neighbourhood community focus to steer a healthier future for the state’s housing market.

“Everyone talks about affordability but I just think affordability can easily be achieved if we had supply back because if we have supply you have competition,” Mr Costelloe told the summit. “At the moment, we don’t have enough chippies, we don’t have enough subbies, we don’t have enough housing choice, we don’t have enough land.

“The town planners might take offence but the planning industry is holding back supply so dramatically, as well as the supply of materials of course. But if we get that up and running and make our system far less red tape … serious cutting of red tape, we could get houses on the ground.”

This would assist “far more competition”, Mr Costelloe said, “so you can’t get price rises because you’ve got plenty of supply and plenty of choice.”

Mr Costelloe also told the Future Victoria Summit – attended by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Premier Jacinta Allan and State Opposition Leader Jess Wilson – that thermal housing design would characterise the future of housing.

“Smart design is the key, as our temperatures rise,” he said. “We’ll get towards maybe 50 degrees one day, we’ve got into the high 40s already, About 10 years ago, we had about 350 deaths in Australia during a heatwave when all the power went down. Now we’ve had these brownouts and blackouts recently and there’s almost no reported deaths because people are building smarter houses which are far more thermally efficient.”

Mr Costelloe said “much smarter” designs to make homes thermally efficient and less energy-dependent – complemented by solar power and batteries – would provide cheaper more comfortable living.

He cited one resident, at Villawood’s Rathdowne in Melbourne’s north, reporting he cut his electricity/gas/petrol bills down by two-thirds. With solar and battery, he now paid $120 a month, with an EV car cutting costs further for an overall conservative saving of $5000 a year.

“They’ve built into one of our microgrids, they’ve built a 7-star house with lots of smart things within the fabric of the house, with the heat exchange, solar, a battery, an electric car,” Mr Costelloe said. “He’s gone from a house where he was paying $300 a month on power, plus gas, plus petrol. Now he’s in a house where his total energy bill’s $120 a month.

“It’s only a third of what it used to be, or even less than a third, because he’s not paying petrol and his car’s costing him $1 per 100 km. That is super-efficient, being much smarter how you design your house to make it thermally efficient, use less energy and then more smarts … we need to design our houses correctly.”