03/03/2026
Land banking continues to play a significant role in shaping Australia’s property market.
LAND BANKING
While families are paying $750 plus a week in rent and can’t find anywhere to live people are sitting on empty land and vacant houses waiting for the prices to go up.
It’s called land banking. And it’s real.
The head of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute confirmed that Investors are buying property and leaving it empty, and banking on capital gains. They don’t want tenants because tenants cause wear and tear. So the house sits there.
Empty. While families sleep in cars.
A property in Perth was documented sitting vacant for two years, the video went viral. It had hundreds of comments from people who couldn’t believe it. A perfectly good house with nobody in it.
And it’s not just houses, foreign investors have been buying up vacant land and not developing it, watching the price climb, then selling it for profit. The federal government admitted the problem is so bad they’ve committed $8.9 million to the ATO and Treasury to crack down on it. They’ve also banned foreign buyers from purchasing existing homes until 2027.
But here’s the kicker. Victoria introduced a vacant land tax in 2025, if your residential property sits empty for more than six months, you pay 1%. From 2026 they expanded it to cover undeveloped residential land too.
WA? Nothing. No vacant land tax. No penalty for sitting on empty property or undeveloped land while Perth has a rental vacancy rate of 0.5% and families are being pushed further and further out
At last count there were fewer than 500 blocks of land listed for sale in all of Perth. A city of over 2 million people. And somewhere out there, investors are sitting on land doing nothing with it because the numbers say wait.
That’s not a free market working, it’s a broken system rewarding the wrong behaviour while everyday people pay the price.
If Victoria can introduce a vacant land tax then why can’t WA? If the federal government can crack down on foreign land banking then why isn’t the state government going after domestic land banking too?
Every empty house is a family that could have a home and vacant block is a house that could be built. And every year nothing changes, the crisis gets worse
I believe it’s time to stop rewarding people for sitting on empty land while Australians can’t find a roof.
What’s your thoughts…?
Peter Lyndon-James 🇦🇺