At the Property Congress, industry leaders emphasised the need to address the skills gaps on construction sites to boost home building, as the industry faces what Simon Kuestenmacher calls a “retirement cliff”.
ISPT head of property Amanda Steele said immigration should target areas with skill gaps, like construction.
“Our immigration is great, but the immigration needs to increase in areas where we have skills gap,” she said.
“When you look at the fact that we have skilled construction workers coming in, but they’re often in suits, not shorts and so we need those skilled construction workers that will work on site, not just sit behind a desk,” Ms Steele said.
Scape co-founder and CEO Craig Carracher warned that poor policy and aggressive immigration cuts would harm Australia’s future, stressing the need for the education sector to attract talent to boost productivity.
“We need the right immigration that supports Australia to achieve what we’re endeavouring to achieve as a country,” he said.
“To me, there is one driver of productivity and it is education, whether that’s traineeships or university research. Anything that restricts our national agenda on education that’s driven by immigration is a bad policy and will come back to haunt us in the future.”
Property Council president and Charter Hall Office CEO, Carmel Hourigan, said a lot of the policy reaction to the housing crisis, such as cuts to immigration or caps is disappointing.
“One of the reasons why we’re getting so much capital flow or attraction into this country is because that population growth.”
“We are an ancient population, and you know, we need to make sure that policies aren’t put in place that actually turn that population growth down, because the capital flows are dependent on it.”
Demographics Group Co-Founder Simon Kuestenmacher told attendees at the Congress that the industry is facing a retirement cliff in key skills areas.
“The retirement Cliff measures what share of the workforce is already of retirement age, 65 and older.
“That is five per cent of the national average, and it measures what share of the population is nearing retirement, meaning they’re 55 to 64 so in the next decade, they will fall off the proverbial retirement cliff, 15 per cent of the national average.”
Mr Kuestenmacher said there are many key trades in the property sector being impacted by this.
“We see them reach retirement at a bit higher rate than the national average, which is already alarming enough.
“But we know that these are very, very tough jobs. These are people that tend to retire a bit sooner.
“There’s already a shortage [of crane operators] … you will run out of more of them, retention is the aim of the game.
“Your buildings, once they are operation, there will be commercial cleaners in there, and we are running out of them as well.
“So that, at very least tells me that the maintenance of a dwelling will get more expensive.”
Mr Kuestenmacher said this skill shortage will be single biggest issue facing the industry.
“We do need to revamp the migration system to make sure that we have more, probably more employer sponsored visas, so that we have a better control over what industries and what kind of jobs we let into the countries.
“What does not need to happen is a slowdown of the migration approach, because it creates much, much more problems than it would potentially solve.”