Housing Minister Carey gaining confidence in housing sector turning corner as apartment builds increase
Mr Carey and property development company Cedar Woods turned the sod on the Incontro Apartments project in Subiaco on Thursday morning, marking the start of construction on the $96 million, 110-apartment block.
While developers are now confident the project will be completed in 2027, prior to February the building had been shelved since 2022 due to a lack of builders.
Cedar Woods managing director Nathan Blackburne said it's an issue plaguing the whole industry.
'Developers have to work very hard in this climate to make apartment projects stack up, predominantly because of the lack of builders currently building these types of projects,' he said.
'You go back five or 10 years, there were many more builders that were actively delivering apartment projects, today there are far fewer.'
Mr Carey said he was seeing an improvement on the number of high-density housing projects.
'All the feedback that we get from a range of the housing sector is this, that the COVID pandemic did shake out and cause some lack of stability for the housing construction sector,' he said.
'It's also fair to say that cost escalations in general has meant that there has been less interest in building a residential product.
'The other observation is that ... it can be more challenging building higher density residential product from other construction in the market.
'There's been a range of issues why we have seen builders leave the residential apartment construction market but I have to say this, we are now seeing more projects come back online and companies like EMCO are stepping up, prepared to do higher density projects.
'So I do have some confidence for the future.'
Master Builders Western Australia chief executive officer Matthew Pollock said high-density apartment was one area of construction still lagging behind.
'It remains to be one area in the sector where it is challenging to find contractors and what we've really seen over the last few years is that there are a smaller pool of contractors looking to take on those types of jobs,' he said.
'A big part of that is just the challenges in the feasibility of those jobs, rising construction costs and also the risk profile that the contractor takes on when building high-density residential apartments.'
Mr Pollock said while there had been a small rise in high-density construction, risk was still large for contractors
'There has been a small uptick, it's been modest, there's a lot of projects that are in planning that we're yet to see them progress to construction,' he said.
'We hope over time and particularly as prices for imports settle that there is greater support for these types of projects to get out of the ground.'
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