18-05-2025
AI to help develop housing solutions
Sabra Lane: Artificial intelligence might help Australia tackle the nation's housing crisis. Universities created a new program using AI to find ways of dealing with planning bottlenecks and supply problems in the sector, Gavin Coote reports.
Gavin Coote : Everyone agrees we're in the midst of a housing crisis, but the solutions aren't all straightforward. Someone who understands the complexity of the challenges is John Engeler, who's the CEO of Shelter NSW and Chair of National Shelter.
John Engeler : I think if there's anything we can take from this recent federal election is that housing is absolutely in the middle of what it is that needs to be looked at. We're all looking at it together. So I think the challenge now is to make sure that we're not describing different parts of the elephant.
Gavin Coote : There's hope artificial intelligence could be part of the answer. A consortium led by the University of NSW and involving academics, industry and government has developed a new facility using AI to bring together all the available data on housing and work on solutions. Professor Chris Pettit is leading the project known as the Housing Analytics Lab, which will open today in Sydney's inner south.
Chris Pettit: The lab is a digital space and a physical space where really we bring people together with tools to help a myriad of aspects of the housing crisis, whether it's understanding the housing supply pipeline or understanding which parts of our city are more unaffordable or becoming more unaffordable, understanding I guess the resilience of our cities to natural disasters and what role data and AI and technology can play.
Gavin Coote : The lab will aim to find new breakthroughs to problems like housing affordability and delays in developing new homes. Chris Pettit says AI will play a major role in helping government and industry pinpoint the current bottlenecks.
Chris Pettit: So basically you can chat to your map and ask questions like, show me my property, tell me what zoning is permissible, what is the zoning of this property and what permissible development am I allowed, what's the nearest school or train station. So enabling AI to make it easier to ask questions of our data. So we know data technology, AI is not going to solve all our challenges, but it's very exciting that we've been able to set up the housing analytics lab to look at the whole housing system because not one sector, not one department can solve this dilemma we're in. We all have to work together.
Gavin Coote : National Shelter Chair John Engeler thinks the use of AI to tackle some of the problems in the sector is a no-brainer.
John Engeler : It's a quick way of being able to take lots of information from different disciplines. So property information is different from planning information, which is different from strata information, which is different from tax. So it allows the way for all of this to be brought together, come up with some solutions. Absolutely, AI is well suited to housing at the moment.
Sabra Lane: National Shelter Chair John Engeler ending Gavin Coote's report.
