Stockland pulls plug on high-rises

PROPERTY developer Stockland has pulled out of high-rise apartment building despite predicting that another 14 million people will need to be housed in Australia by 2050.

Stockland chief executive Matthew Quinn told a property conference that his company had mapped the whole country and could not see where the extra people would live.

"We can't get close to any numbers that will house that population," Mr Quinn told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia annual property outlook in Sydney on Wednesday.

"So something has to give.

"Either we rezone a lot more land in suburban areas, which puts a lot of pressure on infrastructure and transport and so on, or we go higher up.

"We've actually pulled out of high-rise apartments and one of the reasons for that is that it is brain damage."

He said it was hard to obtain "government engagement" for the planning and building of high-rise apartments at a time when major Australian cities needed to increase residential density.

"It's just too hard, so we're focused elsewhere," he said.

"Unless the government has the courage to say we have to have increased density, which they're not doing, people will stop coming here because the housing prices are too high or prices will go through the roof and our standard of living will decline."

Mr Quinn admitted that there was a certain demographic that would never choose high-density living.

"If it's the people with big blocks and white picket fences around their homes, then probably not, but there is a modern generation of Australians where apartment living is the norm for them," he said.

"They actually want it as a choice and they're being denied that choice because of vested local interest that is stopping that from happening."

He said many apartment blocks built during the most recent property boom were of very poor quality.

"Quite how these projects got through the approval system is beyond me."

While Stockland is bullish about its future prospects for building retirement villages as the population ages, Mr Quinn said retirement accommodation would not go beyond three storeys.

It comes in spite of his company urging all levels of government to relax rules around high-rise development.

But he said high-rise apartments for retirees could be built in the future.

"We do have some retirement villages that have multi-storeys, but really, as we do with our housing, it tapers off after about three storeys," he said.

"Nobody has cracked that yet. Maybe it can happen in the future, but really the issues we've got with the planning system being against high-rise apartment development are equally as relevant to a high-rise retirement living development as well and it's just not economic for us to build."

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