Finding your spirit level

Stop dreaming because of the recession! Too many people have put their lives on hold this year. Yes, it has been a good chance to take the lay of the land but it’s been an even better chance to change direction and look at fresh options. While we can be cautiously optimistic, we’re also living in promising times.

It’s fallacious to talk about the world “going back to normal”. The boom before the bust was by its very nature unnatural. What we should be doing is looking for a new spirit level; one which is sustainable and contributes to the betterment of the world today, tomorrow and next year.

A valuable thing you can have done over the past year is to take stock. We’d been running so fast and so hard, no one had time to stop.

So stop! Take a deep breath. Remember what standing in the sunlight for two minutes feels like. (Actually it’s quite energising!)

The boom and bust has made people realise firmly they can’t take bumper business for granted. There’s an end to gratuitous good times. We’ve seen and felt it.

There are now sensible decisions to be made and work to be done. Oh yes – work! That four letter word we kind of forgot about when business was so successful all we had to do was spend each day taking orders and not always caring about the quality of our service.

Work requires skill, application, energy and consistency – all the foundations that have been removed from our working world in recent years. Sheesh, just writing about it makes me feel like my grandfather sprouting old fashioned values. They STILL stand though; now more than ever perhaps.

While BC (before the crash) all you had to do was buy a ticket, stand in the marketplace and the work just happened. We can no longer take for granted the dollars will roll in.

Businesses cannot deal in sales platitudes and casual commentary. Our survival on many levels demands a return to meaningful information and solutions.

Are we missing the real crisis?

It’s a fact we cannot ignore. Australia is in the midst of a national housing shortage which has the potential to cause major repercussions including driving new house prices up, affecting affordability.

Despite all the uplifting stories emerging in our news media about the property market’s resurgence, the bigger concern not being addressed is the shortage of homes.

Alarmingly, experts are predicting by 2010 the nation will be short of 200,000 homes, a fact we can no longer ignore.

The shortage is driven by Australia’s population explosion. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded a 1.9 per cent national population growth during the 12 months ending December 2008 and WA alone recorded a 3.1 per cent increase, the highest of all the States and Territories.

We have been too caught up worrying about the economy, and as a result we’ve neglected to address this very real problem.

It is fairly well known that these issues partly stem from the layers of bureaucratic red tape authorities have put in place which property developers must fight their way through to achieve any sort of progress.

It is hard and expensive to develop and approvals around it need to be simplified and improved.

Governments need to remove the hurdles put in front of property developers so that smoother processes can be put in place and more homes can be developed to meet the demand.

And this revamp of the system is a must do.

Housing stocks need to be replenished otherwise we risk driving up the cost of new homes affecting affordability.

I must emphasise the importance of keeping homes affordable because if we don’t, we risk imposing a stalled market. We need to keep the market ticking over.

People need to be aware of what the bigger issues are here, the small statistics emerging about property may ease our anxiety in the short-term but the issue still remains, we have a serious problem with the shortage of homes in our country.