Barriers to expanding partnerships for affordable rental housing investment

The recent housing boom, experienced across Australian metropolitan markets, has attracted many new investors and resulted in increasing prices across the full range of residential sub-markets for both owner-occupation and investment categories. Of particular concern from a social perspective is the consequential pressure generated in the affordable housing rental market. Moreover, high vacancy rates and modest rental growth in rental housing has caused a deterioration in the investor’s rental yield given these increasing house prices (Powall and Withers, 2004, p.7). In this difficult situation, traditional delivery methods for rental housing are unlikely to continue to attract more investment in this area. Although some innovative proposals - such as public private partnerships in the affordable housing area - have been put forward as solutions, many stakeholders continue to hold doubts about the specious attractions of such approaches (Susilawati and Armitage, 2004). This paper reports the results of a survey of affordable housing providers drawn from a range of backgrounds: namely the private sector, government and non-for-profit organisations. Using in-depth interviews, it compares the opinions of these supply side groups regarding their experiences of the barriers to entry to such partnerships. The findings show agreement across the sector that, for a range of reasons, they have failed to produce better outcomes than would have been expected without the partnership. Further analysis using two-way and three-way cross-tabulation is then used to investigate the importance level between sub-groups.