Australia’s 100 largest builders have snatched the biggest share of the new home market stimulated by the First Home Owner’s Grant.

While the largest builders experienced a 6.5 per cent slide in new home starts, the rest of the market fell by a much harder 17 per cent, enabling the biggest firms to boost their dwelling starts to 38 per cent of national starts in 2008-09, up from 34 per cent the previous year.

The Housing Industry Association (HIA) has found that the 100 top firms started 49,360 dwellings in 2008/09, 3,455 fewer than the year before. In 2008/09 there were 39,947 detached houses and 9,413 flats, units and townhouses started.

Western Australia-based BGC Australia was the biggest builder for the sixth consecutive year. BGC had 3,844 starts, a 540 increase on the previous year.

Meriton Apartments was the nation’s largest multi-unit builder with 1,791 starts, a big jump on the 707 starts that placed the company fifth on the multi-unit list in 2007/08.

HIA chief economist, Dr Harley Dale, said the tripling of the First Home Owner Grant favoured larger builders and prevented a more significant fall in overall starts.

“The boost to the grant helped the Housing 100 increase their share of detached house starts to a record 44 per cent, up from 39 per cent in 2007/08. We expect the share will reach a fresh high in 2009/10,” Dale said.

The emerging recovery is being “constrained by bottlenecks in the approvals process,” Dale said.

“Unless we can make considerable headway in reducing the myriad of supply side constraints to new home building, including cumbersome building approvals processes and a re-emerging skilled labour shortage, then our new home building levels will remain well short of the minimum 190,000 dwellings required per annum to meet underlying demand,” Dale said.

Gemma Battenbough

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