A millionaire property developer says unemployment must increase by up to 50 per cent to jolt tradies back to “productivity”, if the housing crisis is to be solved.
Tim Gurner, the founder of Gurner Group, told the Australian Financial Review Property Summit there needed to be drastic changes.
“Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 per cent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy,” he said, according to the AFR.
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.
“Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.”
In the latest set of numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, unemployment in July was 3.6 per cent.
A 50 per cent increase would see that rise to 5.4 per cent.
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Gurner also called for increased immigration to fill the labour gap, but others at the summit warned that might only increase the pressure on housing.
“We absolutely have to have immigration,” he said.
And he said the planning system in Sydney was “fundamentally broken”.
Homeowners hold onto properties the longest in these ten suburbs
Gurner Group’s website puts the worth of its development and management portfolio at over $9.5 billion.
