More than 40% of Australians support high-rise apartment development so long as it is not in their neighbourhood, a new survey has revealed.

The recently released REA Property Seeker Survey for 2024 asked almost 5000 people questions about their housing preferences – including their attitudes to high-rise development.

The results seem quite pertinent given the Housing Accord goal of 1.2 million new homes over the next five years and the recent announcements on housing from the Victorian state government. The survey was independent research conducted by Starburst Insights on behalf of realestate.com.au.

A lot of the focus of delivering new housing is going to be in in-fill locations and to-date a lot of the proposals focus on high-rise development. The responses in this survey suggest that garnering support for such a shift is going to be a challenge.

The first question detailed relates to increasing housing density and the support of such proposals. Tiny homes (55%) and granny flats/backyard pods were the only types in the survey that received more than 50% support within the respondents’ neighbourhood while high-rise apartments at 29% received the lowest support.

Looking across the state capital cities, high-rise apartments had the greatest support within the respondents’ neighbourhood in Hobart (36%) and Sydney (30%) and the lowest support in Adelaide (26%) and Canberra (28%). Respondents in metropolitan regions (30%) were only slightly more supportive of high-rise apartments in their neighbourhood than those in regional areas (26%).

This is probably little surprise, but respondents were generally more supportive of high-rise apartments in neighbourhoods outside of their own, with 41% of respondents supportive.

The highest level of support for high-rise apartments outside of the respondents’ neighbourhoods were in Canberra (49%) and Brisbane (45%) with the lowest support in Hobart (30%) and Adelaide (40%). Again, respondents in metropolitan areas were marginally more supportive (41%) than those in regional markets (40%).

What was positive for delivering greater housing density was that only 30% of respondents were completely unsupportive of high-rise apartment buildings. Although this was a higher level of unsupportive respondents than those for subdivision of existing plots (21%), tiny homes (16%) and granny flats/backyard pods (12%).

Amongst the state capital cities, the largest share of respondents unsupportive of high-rise apartment buildings were in Hobart (34%) and Adelaide (34%) and the fewest unsupportive responses were in Canberra (22%) and both Sydney and Brisbane (26%). People in regional areas wee more unsupportive of high-rise apartment buildings (34%) than those in capital cities (28%).

The key take-away from these findings are that most people support high-rise development within their region however, they don’t want it locally to where they live. It would seem to suggest that they want this type of development contained to select areas of the city.

Unfortunately, in this survey we did not ask the question about townhouses and mid-rise apartments however, given the stronger support for the lower density options listed I would suspect these types of development would receive greater support than high-rise apartments do.

The lesson I take from this is that it is going to be very difficult to get the public to support high-rise development everywhere. It is going to have to be delivered in select and strategic locations throughout the city. Meanwhile, building up more medium density housing throughout the city is likely to be much more palatable to the wider public.