Queensland housing supply

The planning process is often held to be partly to blame for housing prices in Australia. Unfortunately, there is very little data about the planning system in general, and information on the stock of approvals and the number of new approvals is typically even worse.

In Queensland, the data has become better over the past few years as Council's have begun reporting to the State their approvals activity, and their estimates for the capacity of their planning scheme to provide new dwellings. Councils report that they currently have land zoned for around 660,000 new detached houses. That's about 40 years worth of new detached dwellings able to be built without any changes to zoning laws or any approvals outside the code. To put that in perspective, the total population growth in Queensland is about 70,000 people per year, who require one home per 2.6 people, or 26,000 new homes per year of both apartments (about 10,000) and detached houses (about 16,000).

There are also current approvals for 107,000 new homes, or around 4 year's worth, and 24,000 new approvals being granted each year.

For more fine-grain analysis of the housing supply pipeline, I have created the visualisation below using data from the Queensland Government Statisticians Office. It allows you to see the historical trends in planning approvals for residential dwellings, as well as the stock of current approvals, the lapses of approvals, and so forth. Click on the map to get the historical time series of these indicators for that region. 

Nowhere can I see that councils have hit an approvals limit that might have constrained the rate of supply of new dwellings in an area.