With Sydney experiencing massive apartment rental vacancies:
And Sydney apartment rents plunging:
Multi-billionaire apartment developer, “Highrise” Harry Triguboff, has demanded the state and federal governments offer more incentives to apartment developers and purchasers and open Australia’s international border to migrants in order to drive apartment sales:
“We are suffering because the migrants are not coming and the students have left,’’ said Mr Triguboff, founder of Meriton Apartments…
“Many builders of units have become bankrupt, so then people are not building. It’s no use talking about how good the housing market is if the unit market, which is an important part of the housing market, is not going up anywhere at near the same rate,’’ he said.
Mr Triguboff said it was time the federal government looked seriously at assisting the unit market…
Mr Triguboff said apartment rents were not rising because people preferred to invest in houses, which were enjoying solid rent rises…
“The unit market is the one that is affected by lack of students and migrants”…
He called for the government to help investors by opening the overseas borders as the states did. “We will then have an influx of people and that will help rents to go up and more units will be built,” he said.
We really do live in the real estate version of a narco-state.
There’s a global virus pandemic taking place and all this guy can think about is his own $10.4 billion deep pockets. There’s not a shred of thought about the Australian public’s health or welfare, only Highrise Harry’s own narrow self-interest.
Mass immigration led development is the ultimate Ponzi scheme, with property industry parasites like Highrise Harry privatising the gains while the costs are socialised on the existing population through having to fund the increased infrastructure needs (water, power, transport, recreation facilities etc), paying higher housing costs, as well as suffering the downsides of increasing congestion. None of this registers with Highrise Harry at all, nor that lower apartment rents are improving people’s cost of living.
A return to the broken economic model of the last cycle is precisely NOT what Australia needs. It drove property prices and rents higher marginalising youth. It corrupted our university standards and introduced deeply undemocratic CCP influences on campus. It corrupted our politics and jeopardised ANZUS. It drove down wages as poor foreign students and temporary migrants poured in. It lowered living standards across cities while enriching only a very narrow set of billionaires like Highrise Harry.
A Ponzi scheme is no way to apply government policy for the good of the citizenry.
What Australia needs instead is to leave those migrants at home where they can develop their own economies and export our expertise to them there. We also need to restore our own productive capacity to lower imports and decouple from CCP aggression.
The housing industry should meet the needs of Australians. Not the other way round.