Housing Trust Properties

Mr TELFER (Flinders) (14:32): My question is for the Minister for Housing. How many SA Housing Trust homes are currently vacant and how many of them are tenantable?

The Hon. N.D. CHAMPION (Taylor—Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Minister for Housing Infrastructure, Minister for Planning) (14:32): The latest figures, as of 30 September 2024, in the vacant offerable category are 293; in the vacant non-offerable, the figure is 1,596; in the other vacant category it is 38; and the total number of vacant properties is about 1,927.

To give you an idea of a point in the past which we can make a comparison to, just for the member's information, if you take 30 June 2020, in the vacant offerable there was a significantly higher number of 703, but in the non-offerable it was just 1,000. Those numbers bounce around a bit. In the non-offerable category are buildings that are either not fit for habitation or need maintenance work, or are scheduled for demolition. There are a number of reasons why properties may be vacant. We don't want any property vacant for any longer than it absolutely needs to be.

Clearly there have been issues with the maintenance contracts for some time; that is one of the reasons we had a review into the maintenance of public housing and the Housing Trust. What we want to do over time is put in place policies that will reduce the number of vacant offerables to a normal vacancy rate and obviously be in a position where we can put as many people of need into public housing as we can.