Scentre Group looks to enter housing market by building residential stock on Westfield shopping centres

ABC NEWS (Australia)

One of Australia's largest operators of shopping centres is exploring whether it can build apartments on its shopping centres across the country. Scentre Group owns 42 Westfield shopping centres in both Australia and New Zealand. While the measure would unlock more stock for the state's affordable housing crisis, there are questions how effective it would be.

Transcript

00:00Right in the heart of Hornsby, hundreds of shops are bordered by main roads and train

00:07lines.

00:08And now 53-storey apartments, six times taller than its neighbours, can be built on top.

00:15It's an opportunity for the tenants or the people who might end up living in those homes.

00:20I've been trying to look at renting opportunities and it's just not working out.

00:24Everything is either too expensive or it doesn't work out.

00:26For the Centre Group, the location makes it a winning ticket in the state government's

00:30rezoning lottery.

00:32It has to be in places where there's good public transport available.

00:36If you can take advantage of those large swathes of land and build housing on top of them,

00:42then you're effectively reducing the land cost per dwelling.

00:46Locals are torn on whether it'll make housing more affordable.

00:50Everything's at your fingertips.

00:51You don't really need to leave the area.

00:53We're losing sight of all the things we used to have in this country and shoving 100 apartments

01:00on top of a shopping centre is not one of them.

01:03Centre Group hasn't submitted a development application yet, but one option would be to

01:08own the building long-term and rent the homes on five-year leases.

01:13Then it fulfils one of the most important requirements for the sort of build-to-rent

01:19model, which is trying to appeal to young adults.

01:23The company says it's reviewing its portfolio of 37 shopping centres across Australia.

01:29It's looking at where it can build apartment towers to help both the housing shortage and

01:33its bottom line.

01:35The company is trying to rezone Westfield East Gardens to develop build-to-rent apartments

01:41and student accommodation.

01:43At Westfield Parramatta, it has the green light to build 220-metre-tall commercial towers.

01:50But slumping demand due to remote work has it exploring apartments instead.

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