We're in the middle of a building boom that has led us to build roughly 200,000 homes each year for the last 5 years.
This is the fastest pace of home building in our history according to research by REA's Proptrack. 
They say that between the September 2016 quarter and the June 2021 quarter, which is the most recent data we have, Australia built just over a million new homes.
Now we mostly build detached houses - of the last million homes built in Australia, 55% were detached houses.
But in the past five years, there has seen a surge in apartment and semi-detached construction, which has been responsible for the faster rate of the overall building.
In fact, we are still building roughly as many houses each year as we did in the 1970s.
Where is all this construction occurring?
Proptrack found that:
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- New homes have been disproportionately built in Victoria.
While Victoria accounts for a quarter of Australia's population, nearly a third of our last million homes were built in Victoria where the population grew at 2 to 2.5% annually – the fastest growth of any state by considerable margin. - New houses are mostly being built in the outer suburbs and in regional areas.
- New apartments are mostly in inner Melbourne and Sydney
- Apartment development in Melbourne has been particularly concentrated the city centre including Docklands and Southbank.
- In Sydney apartment development occurred mainly in Sydney's middle ring suburbs, particularly in locations on major train lines.
What's ahead?
We know with the many government incentives including Homebuilder there has been a surge of new house approvals in the past year, many of which are still under construction. 
This means in contrast to the last five years, we will be building more houses and fewer apartments over the next few years.
And we are already seeing some signs of that shift in the types of homes we are building.
COVID has created a nearly two-year experiment with working from home which has led many people to reconsider where they want to live and the premium they put on location versus space.
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