Building better future
VOLUME builders say demand created in part due to a $25,000 federal government grant for first-home buyers will keep the region’s construction sector buoyed until 2023.
Burbank builders’ general manager for housing Louis Saltan said regional areas in Victoria had offered the most demand for homes built using the government’s HomeBuilder grants scheme, which closed this week.
“We’ve been employing new people and they’ve been doing overtime,” he said.
“We are doing everything to get these houses started.”
Mr Saltan said Burbank had employed about more 20 staff in its Victorian office, expanded its trades workforce by 30 per cent, and added operation staff and engineers across the country. “We are employing supervisors and we are trying to get new contractors,” he said.
“We’d rather be in this situation … than the reality of what was happening last April in terms of our deposit numbers that just capitulated.”
Mr Saltan said the company had to plan for machinery and supply shortages.
Bonnie Hinkley and Matthew Waters, about to move into their home at Charlemont, said the grant had helped them buy a home two years earlier than planned.
“We had been looking for a few years, we just hadn’t been seriously considering the opportunity to do it as quickly as we did,” Ms Hinkley said.
“(The grant) definitely sped things up a lot.”
Mr Waters said: “The house that’s been built wouldn’t have been able to be
unless we had the grant. We think it’s a great spot, one we can see ourselves being in for a long time.”
Federal Labor has called for HomeBuilder’s building commencement to be stretched from six to 12 months after contract signature date to “make it easier for builders to comply with the rules and enPOLICE
sure homeowners don’t miss out”.
Federal Housing Minister Michael Sukkar said the government already extended the construction commencement deadline from three to six months.
“Builders are telling us it’s a tight time frame but they are able to meet the commencebuilt ment deadlines. We’ll keep a really close eye on it,” Mr Sukkar said.
He said the building industry would be sustained into 2023 due to HomeBuilder.
“(Nationwide) we’ve gone from an industry which looked like shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs to now an industry which is growing,” he said.
Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson said: “We delivered this (at a time) where there was a great deal of uncertainty as to what the future held.”
Across the country, the government has committed to more than 100,000 HomeBuilder grants with an 80-20 split between new homes and extensions.
Supporting documentation for HomeBuilder grants can be submitted to the State Revenue Office until April 30, 2023.