Energy Efficiency

The Australian Housing Industry Association is one of the leading backward thinking bastions of growth is good; their lack of comprehension and single mindedness is added to the small but overly vocal and financially liquid group trying to convince the government that as their business will suffer from lack of demand (read consumers) and overheads go up, that political donations will go down, therefore we need immigration.

Politicians can pay immigrants the equivalent to the dole or whatever, as long as immigrants have money to be consumers; profitability and margins are important when it comes tho them doing business, but the public monies bucket is ‘bottomless’

The HIA are exponents in double standards and rhetoric, on one hand charging hundreds of dollars to builders to do an ineffective course in energy efficient house design and on the other, talking of the waste of money in attempting to make housing energy efficient.

It has largely escaped them that energy efficiency (using less energy) comes about entirely by houses designed and built to be comfortable; hot in summer and cold in winter homes have a high demand for energy to cool down or warm, its hardly rocket science. But it should come as no surprise that corporate sponsorship / membership to the HIA by companies that specialize in making building materials that exasperate homes less comfortable is the main motivation of this and similar groups.

Economist (long recognized as related to Sybil Fawlty, for stating the bleeding obvious)  industry groups disagree on future house prices

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/22/2522881.htm?section=justin

Well of course they’ll disagree with Steve Keen – their livelihoods are at stake. The point they fail to grasp/make is that it doesn’t matter how big the shortfall in housing or how large the population, without jobs, income and money no-one can’t buy a house.

Shantytowns around the world bear witness to this sad fact. But, The Housing Industry Association says there is currently a shortage of about 70,000 properties in Australia and it is expected to worsen by 2020.

The association’s chief executive, Chris Lamont, says the housing shortage will act to stabilise the market and could even push prices up; “That’s going to put some stickiness in respect to house prices and certainly a floor under house prices; certainly the housing market is like any other market where you have a shortage of supply but very strong demand – that acts to stabilise prices of even push prices up; and certainly what we’ve seen is a shrinking in respect to market activity but certainly no wholesale fire sales across the country.”

The New South Wales Real Estate Institute also disagrees with Professor Keen’s predictions. The institute’s president, Steve Martin, says a massive slide in the market is unlikely to happen. “It’s important to note that not only is our market underpinned by first home owners, but investors are coming back into the market and of course people in Australia want to own their own property so we have plenty of demand,” he said.

Since Rudd got in, some 40,000 first home buyers entered the market, its debatable as to what proportion of these person could have otherwise bought a home and what effect that has had with respect to pumping the prices up; however, if the FHOG ceases on July 1st in 2009, then I believe we will see a dramatic effect in the reduction of building within 12 months and rather than property prices going up – because there are less house than ‘required’, they’ll drop due to worsening affordability from the economic downturn.

People will start reversing the trend of less people per home as more people in the home equates to cost savings through sharing.