Our cities are evolving after the pandemic, but urbanisation still has a long way to go, say the leaders of Australia’s major property businesses.
. Right through our businesses and through the supply chain, there are enormous job vacancies that we just can’t fill. We were sitting around the table the other day and saying, ‘Where have all the humans gone?’
They are coming back. And we are seeing that. And so we’ve seen a real dramatic return. But it’s a bit leader-led.And one of the things I said to the team, you start walking the floor as leaders and just talking to about people and getting that connection back. And we’re now starting to set up vibrancy.That’s one of the trends that was a trend before COVID, which is now a hyper trend – this bifurcation of buildings that will be fit for purpose into the future and buildings that won’t.
Flexibility has to work for your customer, your team and you in that order. Have the conversation with your manager about what that looks like for your team. And we’ll let it flow and see what happens. We were getting up to 70 per cent, 80 per cent of people back in our head office.that were there pre-COVID. They are going to be continuing, so pre-COVID to now, everything else being equal, there will be a pullback on space.
But you can look at cities around the world. So you go to New York, and you go into Tribeca and SoHo, and you see old buildings that went from being industrial buildings to homes. And you’ll go through that repositioning, that will occur in our cities here. So then what’s going to happen is more and more people will live in a city. Some of these older buildings may become residential buildings or repurposed in a different way. So the city will continually grow.
Stockland: In 1952 Hungarian architect Ervin Graf subdivided a poultry farm at Sefton in suburban Sydney to build 19 homes, doing much of the work himself. That year, with partner Albert Scheinberg, he formed Stocks & Holdings, the company that became Stockland, which Graf led for 38 years. Celebrating its 70th year this year, the $9 billion Stockland is headed by former Lendlease chief financial office Tarun Gupta, who is in charge of a $37 billion pipeline of projects.
But we have seen, globally, multifamily or build-to-rent products really correct. So all rents now are above pre-COVID levels. We’ve got a real supply issue on affordability that we’ve got to solve. It’s about getting that supply right.