Luci Ellis: Housing in the endemic phase

Keynote speech by Ms Luci Ellis, Assistant Governor (Economic) of the Reserve Bank of Australia, to the Urban Development Institute of Australia 2022 National Congress, Sydney, 25 May 2022.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

I would like to thank UDIA for the opportunity to speak to you today. I'd originally been invited to the same congress two years ago, but the event was cancelled for obvious pandemic-related reasons.

Suffice to say, the talk I'm giving today is very different from the one I had written and planned to give in March 2020. Two years of pandemic and ongoing recovery have profoundly affected every aspect of how we live and work, but few more so than our housing choices.

In fact, things have changed so much on this front that the focus of my talk is almost solely the drivers of housing outcomes. There is that much to talk about! I won't have anything to add about monetary policy, beyond what has already been published in recent weeks in the Governor's media conference, the Statement on Monetary Policy, and the Board Minutes. And I'm not going to say much about the prices of established homes. Rather, I plan to focus on some of the underlying drivers of housing demand, their likely persistence, and the capacity of the construction industry to meet that demand.