A key marker for delivering much-needed relief from the housing and rental crisis won't be met in NSW for at least several years, senior government figures concede.
Amid concern that the desperately needed turnaround in the housing sector is yet to start, Planning Minister Paul Scully on Thursday talked down the importance of a goal to build 75,000 new homes in the state each year.
The state needs to build at that near-record rate to meet its share of national cabinet's target of one million new homes by 2029.
But, with annual completions currently at a paltry 48,000 homes, Mr Scully stressed recent reforms to increase density and speed up approvals would not drastically lift approvals overnight.
Those changes had also upended government forecasts, leaving the minister unable to say when the state could pump out 75,000 homes within a year.
"A reasonable person would say 'let's give those reforms the opportunity: one, to be bedded down and two, for the industry to gear up,'" he told reporters.
It comes after Premier Chris Minns also drew a line through achieving the 75,000 mark this year while underlining a desire to see a "major increase" in the coming year.
Falling short of the mark in earlier years will leave the state having to go far further in later years.
Lamenting the "confused and confusing" planning system he inherited from the previous government, Mr Scully said his department was throwing everything at meeting the 2029 target.
"Some of our reforms are going to make sure that we're not only delivering housing in the immediate term but we're delivering them long into the future," Mr Scully told reporters.
"That's the sort of reform that NSW needs."
Property developers have urged a renewed focus on approvals, with some councils averaging more than six months to tick or flick proposals.
"Developers are ready to build the new homes and communities we desperately need, but first they just need their applications approved," Urban Development Institute of Australia NSW acting chief executive Gavin Melvin said.
The building watchdog also expressed confidence in the industry's ability to ramp up while avoiding widespread defects, despite issues being flagged in a string of major developments.
In one of 10 rectification orders issued this month, the NSW Building Commission called on developer Greenland to address "serious damage" to concrete in the basement of a unit block at Macquarie Park in Sydney's northwest.
Commissioner David Chandler however dismissed suggestions the complex was at imminent risk of collapse, expressing high confidence in Greenland doing "everything we want" to fix the problem.
His recently expanded office of 400 public servants was now able to intervene more often before defects developed into major problems, he said.
"There are very, very positive signs that the (rate of) defects in new buildings in NSW are coming down," he said.
"The challenge we've got, of course, is that we've got legacy projects ... and we've probably got quite a number of them."
The opposition accused the government of riding roughshod over local communities to meet the national housing target.
"Chris Minns didn't seek advice on how NSW could reach the target before signing on the dotted line, and has now backed down from what he said was his government's greatest challenge," housing spokesman Scott Farlow said.
