UK immigration balloons
The UK's Office for National Statistics released the latest figures for net immigration, and they were once again huge.
Three or four Prime Ministers ago (it's hard to keep track, to be fair!), the Conservative Party's David Cameron promised to bring immigration down "to the tens of thousands", but as it turned out, we got...well, effectively millions!
Net immigration over the past three calendar years has cumulatively totaled +1,915,000.
It's a lot of extra people for a small island.
The shambolic Tories will quite rightly be ousted at the polls on July 4, but it's a Hobson's Choice and I don't know whether all that much of note will change under the PM-elect Sir Keir Starmer.
Parallel trends
It's interesting how so many parts of the world are facing similar challenges at similar times over recent years - lockdowns, student housing shortages, energy shocks, services price inflation, rental crises, and housing shortages, to name but a few.
Academics in the UK periodically come up with borderline Stalinist
proposals for reallocating the supply of housing stock, usually with some kind of carbon emissions and ecological undertones woven therein, the latest of which appears to be taxing people for having under-occupied bedrooms.
The definitions of what might constitute a 'spare' bedroom seem to hark back to the period of Polish communist rule to my untrained eye...
I'm not sure forcing 19-year-olds to share bedrooms with 4-year-olds is the right solution to anything, but there you go.
Of course the common sense solution to a housing shortage would be to lower immigration and build more homes....but in the UK, as elsewhere, this is not proving to be so easy.
Caboolture West knockback
Back in Australia, the latest figures showed G8 University international student numbers ballooning 17 per cent higher than last year to new record highs, while policy settings are crippling the prospect of new housing supply.
Not only have mortgage rates moved significantly higher, we have 3 percentage points lending assessment buffers in place to restrict borrowing, and construction firms are killing off proposed projects all over the place, with insolvencies in the sector already at decade highs.
AV Jennings revealed this week that it won't be proceeding with a planned 3,500 homes at Caboolture West due to "expected costs not aligning with forecasts".
This comes in spite of an enormous and sustained surge in demand for housing across south-east Queensland.
Infrastructure and building costs have increased significantly, and to proceed would put greater stress than expected on the group's balance sheet, reported The Australian today.
The AV Jennings share price closed at 32 cents, underscoring what a challenging time it's been for developers to make projects work.
With tough land tax thresholds coming into force in Victoria, I expect to see medium-density approvals fall to 15-year lows in Melbourne in the second half of 2024.
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