Land delays pushing SA builders to the brink with more redudancies likely, industry experts warn

Industry experts say that SA’s building industry is on a knife’s edge due to the lack of shovel-ready land. Here’s why.

Major building industry experts warn that more redundancies are likely with South Australia’s building industry on a “knife’s edge” due to the lack of shovel-ready land.

With Hickinbotham forced to fire sales staff due to the delay last week, Master Builders SA warn that other businesses are likely to follow suit if more land isn’t made available soon.

While “this wave of uncertainty” isn’t likely to affect existing homeowners, new customers could face massive delays in the future.

“The building and construction industry should be pumping to meet the current demand, but there’s simply not enough supply of land,” Master Builders SA CEO Will Frogley said.

“The lack of shovel-ready land is starting to impact a number of residential builders and threatening to grind our industry to a halt, unless we act now.”

While “this wave of uncertainty” isn’t likely to affect existing homeowners, new customers could face massive delays in the future, he said.

His concerns are shared by Home Industry Association SA Executive Director Stephen Knight who said it was a problem “everybody” was working to solve within the industry.

“It’s not unknown that we’ve had issues with land supply, and that’s being driven by the enormous demand for housing over the last couple of years,” he said.

“It (demand) was driven primarily by the home builder grant which sucked up what was available land.”

This combined with SA’s strong population growth has made it harder to keep up with the demand as “getting land ready to build on is a time-consuming exercise.”

“The government has recognised the problem and I don’t think anybody is backing away from that,” he said.

“They’ve put some money on the table, $1.4b, but you can’t solve this in a day.”

Originally published as Land delays pushing SA builders to the brink with more redudancies likely, industry experts warn