Larry Williams Drive

In a country of 25.5 million people, there are just one million vacant dwellings.Rising cost-of-living pressures have not only pushed Australia’s real estate and rental prices up, but the national vacancy rate is less than 10 per cent.That’s according to the 2021 Census, which has revealed while there were nearly one million new dwellings counted compared with 2016, just over one million of Australia’s total 11 million dwellings are unoccupied.South Australia had among the lowest rates of housing availability, with just over 83,000 unoccupied dwellings of the total 808,000 in the state.Just over 299,000 of the 3.3 million dwellings in NSW were unoccupied. Similarly, in Victoria, there were more than 2.8 million dwellings, of which 298,000 were unoccupied.The ACT also has an issue with housing availability, with just over 12,000 of the capital’s 187,000 dwellings unoccupied.Statisticians estimate many of those dwellings are vacant holiday homes or vacant investment properties.Only two-thirds of households owne