Are You For Real Estate?!

The Mother has sent me a clipping from a recent issue of Hong Kong’s biggest English-language newspaper, The South China Morning Post. It is an article detailing the housing shortage gripping the Pilbara, and the astronomical prices of houses as a result. It made me laugh, not because this isn’t a very real issue because it is. As the article reports, the median house price in Karratha is a whopping AU$775,000, 49 percent more than Sydney’s. If you want to rent a four-bedroom home here, you’re looking at AU$10,000 a month – that’s triple the average apartment rent in Manhattan. It’s absolutely ridiculous and completely unaffordable by anyone who’s not making a mint in mining or oil and gas. The crazy living costs, which don’t just end at house prices – you pay an arm and a leg for food and entertainment too – make it very difficult for those in the services sector to live here. Some end up having to ‘hot-bed’, renting a bed which is taken by someone else as soon as they get up.


No, that’s not what I find funny except in a crazy, surrealist sort of way. What made me laugh out loud is the way the journalist of this article described Karratha, as a ‘fly-ridden, cyclone-prone outpost’. I’m sure the tourism board and council would have been happy about that. Come and visit Karratha, you’ll love it as long as you have a passion for flies and cyclones. WA’s government acknowledges there’s a severe problem regarding the dichotomy which exists between the workers needed to sustain this resources boom (which accounts for a great deal of the money being generated in the state) and the lack of housing able to accommodate them. That is where the new ‘Pilbara Cities’ scheme comes into place. Western Australia Premier Colin Barnett is planning to transform the Pilbara’s hubs into sustainable cities, places where people move to permanently, who live here rather than just work and wait to go back to their real homes. Money is being poured into the scheme, which plans to build extensive facilities such as shopping centres, cinemas, restaurants and marinas, as well as affordable housing, in the hope of attracting 50,000 people to places like Karratha by 2035. Clearly, they’ve got a long way to go. Who would want to live in a ‘fly-ridden, cyclone-prone outpost’? With a reputation like that, the government will never manage to encourage skilled workers and their families to up sticks and make a life for themselves in Karratha. They need to change hearts and minds. And perhaps invent some sort of widespread fly eliminator.