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Media Release: The best and worst Sydney Councils on housing approvals – ABS data
CEO of Urban Taskforce Australia, Tom Forrest said that today’s ABS data release of total dwelling approvals, by LGA, from the start of the National Housing Accord until February 2025, show the mile-wide difference between high-performing and low-performing councils.
This data looks at the first 8 months of the Housing Accord and a clear trend of under-performance is emerging.
The pro-rata performance is dismal – though to be fair, the recent reforms have not yet flowed through to the data.
Full marks for those councils that have reached their LGA targets to date, but the five worst Councils should hang their heads in shame. The ABS data shows Burwood Council as the top performing LGA in NSW, more than doubling their pro-rata National Housing Accord targets with 1,078 homes approved, 245% of their targeted 440 dwellings.
Second place was Hawkesbury with 250 dwellings approvals, 144% of their target (when adjusted for the 8 months that the Accord has applied.
Third was Canada Bay with 761 approved homes.
Top Five Performing Councils in Greater Sydney:
The problem is, if the 5th place goes to a Council that is not even meeting the target, the other 28 councils in Greater Sydney must be way behind.
The data confirms what many already knew – that the worst performing council in Greater Sydney is North Sydney, having only approved 44 new dwellings of the 787 dwelling completions in their pro-rata target. They hit an astonishingly poor rate of only 6% of their pro-rata target since the start of the accord.
The five worst performing Councils in Greater Sydney:
Across Sydney, Councils have only approved 59% of the pro-rata completion target (the number you would need to get if you divided the period of the accord to date – 8 months by the total 5 years of the Accord).
Between the National Housing Accord’s start in July 2024, until the end of February 2025, there should have been 50,267 homes completed in NSW, 35,120 in Greater Sydney. This period has only seen 30,607 approvals for NSW and 25,545 for Sydney.
End.