An "enormous chunk" of Australia's housing stock is unoccupied, and "something must be done" about it, a demographer says.
According to figures from the 2021 census, one million Australian homes — 10 per cent of the housing stock — were unoccupied on census night last August.
There could be a number of reasons for that — a resident could be staying at a partner's place that night or the house could be a holiday home or a vacant investment property.
But the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) "takes quite a substantial range of methods to ensure that it calculates the usual residents of an area", ANU demographer Liz Allen says, "so we can say with great confidence that the unoccupied dwellings are in fact largely potentially an option for housing for people who are in need of secure housing".
"The fact that people are not living in these homes is an enormous oversight from a policy perspective, particularly when housing affordability and homelessness is such an issue in Australia," she said.
In 2016, the number of unoccupied dwellings was about the same but accounted for 11 per cent of the housing stock.
The ABS said it had a 96.1 per cent dwelling response rate for the 2021 census.
"The overwhelming majority of Australians this census, for the first time, were at home — not surprisingly, given that the majority of Australians were in lockdown at the time of the 2021 census," Dr Allen said.
There has been a drop in the percentage of homes sitting empty compared with the 2016 figure in all states and territories, even though the number of unoccupied dwellings actually rose in NSW and Victoria.
The jurisdiction with the greatest proportion of unoccupied dwellings was the Northern Territory with 12.8 per cent (down from 14.1 per cent in 2016), followed by Tasmania with almost 11.8 per cent (down from 14 per cent in 2016) and Victoria with 11.1 per cent (down from 11.7 per cent in 2016).
The jurisdiction with the smallest proportion of unoccupied dwellings was the ACT with 6.6 per cent (down from 8.1 per cent in 2016). The other states had figures around 9 and 10 per cent.
Fewer Airbnbs amid pandemic
One possible explanation for some of that drop could be the decline in properties listed on the short-stay accommodation website Airbnb.
University of Queensland geographer Thomas Sigler said there were 330,000 properties in Australia available for one night or more in 2019, about 70 per cent of those were entire properties to rent.
By 2021, there were 231,000 properties listed for one night or more.
Dr Sigler said, however, there were many reasons why a property might be vacant.
National Shelter chief executive Emma Greenhalgh said more analysis was needed of the census figures to better understand the reasons.
Principal solicitor at the Tenants' Union of Tasmania, Ben Bartl, said there were "good reasons" why properties may have been deemed vacant by the census.
"People may be in hospital, they may be on a business trip, they may have been staying at their partner's house, so just because a property's empty doesn't mean it's genuinely empty," Mr Bartl said.
The Tenants' Union is, however, concerned about the number of vacant homes. It has used data from water authority TasWater to show that there were about 2,000 properties in the state that had been empty for three years.
Mr Bartl said those properties were not being used for short-term rentals.
Vacant property tax?
Dr Allen said policy change was needed to discourage properties from being left vacant.
"The policy settings support housing as a wealth creation and for people to own multiple properties," she said.
"There's a lot of theoretical considerations when it comes to the taxation of properties that are left vacant … the issue is that we have so many homes that are being left vacant while so many are in need of homes and secure housing."
The Australian Greens want three main changes to housing policy: a levy on vacant properties, phasing out negative gearing and capital gains, and building more public and affordable housing.
"At the end of the day, right now, the housing market is treating homes as a speculative commodity for investors to make a buck on when it should be treated as a place for someone to call home," Greens' housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather said.
A tax on vacant residential properties in Melbourne was introduced in 2017.
Federal Labor in 2017 supported a tax on vacant properties, but Housing Minister Julie Collins did not clarify whether the party still held such a policy.
"The Albanese government has a strong set of policies that we took to the election to help address these challenges and we are already working hard to fill these commitments," Ms Collins said.
"These policies include implementing a new national housing and homelessness plan.
"In addition, the Housing Australia Future Fund will build 30,000 social and affordable housing properties nationally in its first five years."
Federal Labor also previously had policies to limit negative gearing but abandoned those policies last year.
According to New Zealand's 2018 census, 10.3 per cent of its housing stock was unoccupied. A 2021 analysis by money.co.uk estimated 8.7 per cent of Canadian houses were unoccupied. In England in 2019, 2.7 per cent of houses were unoccupied, according to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Ministry.
