Housing starts rise
There was a solid 11.7 per cent uplift in the number of private sector new dwelling starts in the March 2025 quarter, to a seasonally adjusted total of 47,645.
It's still a long way below the implied target of around 60,000, but represents a marked improvement, both for detached homes and for attached dwellings.
In particular, New South Wales and Queensland are miles behind target, as is also the case in South Australia and Tassie.
On the downside, it's taking far longer than it should to actually get homes built, at an average of over 10 months for a detached house (way up from around 6½ months only a few years ago).
The number of dwelling completions thus in turn slowed to just 43,517, seasonally adjusted, which was a rather disappointing result, with completions cumulatively only about ¾ of what's deemed to be necessary across the financial year to date.
Looking ahead it seems likely that conditions will improve for homebuilders as the cost of capital comes down, and materials costs level out.
Where the cranes are...
There were fewer dwellings approved but not yet commenced, especially in Sydney as more apartment projects finally got underway.
Overall, slightly more units were under construction in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide over the March quarter...but this was not yet the case for Brisbane or Perth.
The total estimated number of dwellings under construction was 219,883 (the all-time high watermark was an estimated 244,180 in 2022).
The wrap
In summary, it's still taking longer than it should to build dwellings, but the number of housing starts has at least moved beyond the cycle nadir in 2025, and should continue to trend higher from here.
Unit supply has been painfully slow in Sydney and Melbourne over recent years, but looks set to improve forthwith.
Brisbane is still lagging somewhat, however, perhaps due to exceptionally high construction costs in the Queensland capital as a raft of infrastructure projects has created high demand for resources and labour.
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In other news, year-on-year inflation looks to have picked up a notch in the US, Canada, Eurozone, and especially the UK in June 2025, where fuel and meat prices took the inflation rate all the way back up to 3.6 per cent (versus 3.4 per cent expected by the market forecasters).
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