Tasmania built 2,456 homes against its 5,022-home target: HIA

The Housing Industry Association has released its Locked Out report this month, finding Tasmania built 2,456 homes last year against an annual target of 5,022 under the National Housing Accord, and ranking the state last of any jurisdiction against that benchmark.

Why it matters

HIA’s case is that the shortfall is not a builder or demand problem, it is a land problem. The report argues Tasmania has a shortage of serviced, zoned lots that someone can actually start building on, with approvals split across councils, the state government and TasWater before a block is ready to sell. For a Tasmanian builder, that means the construction queue is not the bottleneck; the land pipeline feeding it is. A developer weighing a southern Tasmania subdivision, or a builder planning next year’s book, now has a benchmark for how far official land release is running behind the state’s own housing target.

The numbers

Tasmania’s 2,456 completions sit at roughly half the 5,022-home target the state needs to hit under the National Housing Accord, the gap HIA’s report title points to directly. That shortfall - roughly 2,566 homes - means the state delivered only about 49 per cent of its Accord-linked target in a single year. The report also tracks the price of land itself: the median residential block in Greater Hobart has risen from around $35,000 in 2001 to nearly $300,000 now, a roughly eight-fold increase over 25 years that HIA attributes to scarcity of ready-to-build lots rather than construction cost. HIA’s Tasmania executive director, Benjamin Price, is named in the report as the source for the land supply diagnosis, putting the blame on the release pipeline rather than the industry’s capacity to build. The report sets out 15 recommended reforms, among them a public land supply dashboard, an infrastructure fund for already-zoned land, and legislated development assessment panels with deemed approval when councils miss deadlines - a mechanism meant to stop a block sitting in the approval queue once a council decision date has already passed.

The land supply figures sit alongside a separate HIA dataset on Tasmania’s building pipeline: the state’s home starts remain the weakest in the nation, 12.7 per cent below the 10-year average, even as dwelling approvals climbed 21.8 per cent over the past year. Read against the Locked Out findings, that gap looks less like a builder-capacity problem and more like confirmation of HIA’s core argument: approvals can clear the planning system faster than land can be serviced and released, leaving builders with paper approvals but no sellable, ready-to-build block to actually start on.

What’s next

HIA wants five of its 15 reforms delivered within 12 months, including replacing the PlanBuild portal with a licensed statewide system and adopting the state’s own Improving Residential Standards recommendations. None of that is enacted yet; it is a reform wishlist attached to an industry report, not a government commitment. For developers and builders, the near-term signal is that any serviced land released under the state’s existing Greater Hobart Urban Growth Boundary expansion will be scarce and contested until a dashboard or infrastructure fund materially speeds up the pipeline HIA says is the real constraint on hitting the 5,022-home target. Until land supply catches up, the approvals growth documented in HIA’s other Tasmanian releases is likely to keep outpacing what builders can actually start, widening rather than closing the gap the Locked Out report puts at the centre of the state’s housing shortfall.