Bums on diggers

The other day I was poring over the NZIER's latest compilation of consensus forecasts - an invaluable resource from many perspectives, not least for establishing the base scenario underpinning current financial market pricing - and I came across something really interesting*, which I've highlighted in the table below. It's the one that helpfully shows not only the consensus expectation, but also the high and low stabs at each variable.

That's a pretty remarkable range of views on the outlook for housebuilding. At one extreme you've got a scenario where - I'm abstracting here, but I think it's okay - the wind-down of the Canterbury rebuild will outweigh new housing starts in Auckland, detracting from overall GDP, while at the other end the Auckland market will go gangbusters, growing far more than Canterbury will contract, and boosting GDP.

To put some numerical perspective on it, the cumulative difference between the bullish and bearish housebuilding scenarios is $4.9 billion by March '20, which is equivalent to 2.1% of our current annual GDP. That's the difference between an expansion that's vigorous enough to keep the unemployment rate trending down, and one that would see it drift back up again.

If we assume that the wind-down in Canterbury is the relatively predictable moving part, then much of the forecast uncertainty boils down to differing views about the likely strength of house construction in Auckland. Presumably the bearish view is based on either low starts to begin with, or capacity constraints of one kind or another (labour, land, planning chokepoints) preventing potentially higher numbers of starts from getting underway.

And then this morning I saw MBIE has just published the latest vacancies data. Here it is, showing vacancies by occupation (there's a similar pattern by skill level). There's strong and rapidly increasing demand for the occupations you'd likely be looking for on the building site.

It could be that employers are having no trouble filling these vacancies: all we know for sure is that the hiring signs are out, and we don't know whether they're actually finding the people they're advertising for. And so far the Auckland numbers aren't flashing red lights: as the table below shows, Auckland is in the middle of the pack for year on year increases in vacancies.

It's also encouraging (although it was a few months back now) that the NZIER's March quarter Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion found that

Building firms...report a continued easing in the shortage of unskilled labour, although skilled labour remains very difficult to find. With the surge in net migration driven by an increase in the numbers of people coming in on work visas in the trades profession, this is helping to alleviate some of the labour shortages as construction activity continues to grow.

Though the QSBO can be read different ways: as the Reserve Bank put it in its latest Monetary Policy Statement (p21)

As suggested by the March Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO), capacity constraints are tightening. Firms are reporting labour shortages and, more recently, some increased difficulty in obtaining finance. This appears to be related to the tightening in bank lending standards for residential property development and pressures created by rising construction costs

My instinct is that capacity constraints in Auckland are likely to be a worry. I'm not temperamentally inclined to restrict immigration in the first place, but if people are minded to, they ought to be careful about the risk of impeding the housing build we need to do, and the equally necessary infrastructure build, which calls on much the same labour force skills.

The Labour Party in its latest immigration policy at least had the wit, albeit in a clunky Gordon Brownish micromanagement way, to realise there's a potential issue here. It proposed that

Residential construction firms could hire a skilled tradesperson on a three-year work visa without having to meet the Labour Market Test if they pay a living wage and take on an apprentice for each overseas worker they hire. The number of places will be limited to 1,000 to 1,500 at a given time, which we expect will be additional to the construction work visas issued under the existing rules.

At the moment, I wouldn't give two hoots about Labour Market Tests and apprenticeship quotas. If there's an Irish lad on his gap year after secondary school, or anybody else prepared to get the roof on the house or pour the cement on a road, bring it on.

*Bearing in mind that this is an economist's idea of  'interesting'