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The construction industry has warned the federal government's goal of building 1.2 million new well-located homes in the next five years will begin on the back foot because of a significant worker shortage.
The government's five-year target, part of the National Housing Accord agreed to by the states and territories, begins mid-year.
BuildSkills Australia – a group tasked by the government to find solutions to the workforce challenges facing the construction industry – said that to stay on-track, the government would need to build 60,000 new homes each quarter, which would require a workforce of 90,000 people more than currently exists.
The group's executive director of research and planning, Robert Sobyra, said attracting that many workers in such a short time frame was impossible.
"Clearly next quarter we're not going to be able to achieve that 60,000 run rate, which means that in future quarters, we're going to have to deliver more to make-up for what we don't do at the front-end of the program," he said
Master Builders Australia chief executive Denita Wawn said the analysis by BuildSkills aligned with what she was hearing from the industry.
"I'm concerned that there is no way known we can get 90,000 [workers] in three months, unless we had a radical change in the way upon which we are looking at our migration system, and our skill recognition system to support a fast-tracked migration solution," she said.
"Every single builder we talk to at the moment says we need more people – and we need them fast."
As well as boosting the number of migrants with trade skills, Ms Wawn said it also needed to be quicker, cheaper and less convoluted for overseas qualifications to be recognised.
"We're pushing constantly for trades to be on the skilled priority list – it's critical that we do that," she said.
But Ms Wawn said there also needed to be a push to attract more women to the sector, and encourage it as a viable career to school leavers, too.
"Only four per cent of apprentices at the moment are female, yet we complain in this country that we have gender pay-gap problems," Ms Wawn said.
"Well, if we saw more women working in trades, we would go a long way to resolving gender pay gap given we're so well paid."
But she remained optimistic the five-year target could still be achieved by 2029, and on time, because of how needed it is.
"The federal government should be commended that they've actually focused their attention around supply, not demand," she said.
"[But], we now need to focus on how we can actually get there.
"The issue really is: how do we actually encourage more people into our sector?"
Mr Sobyra agreed that while the analysis from BuildSkills put into focus "how ambitious the target is," it was still possible.
"The level itself is not out of the realms of possibility, but getting up to that level as quickly as we need to, that's going to be the very difficult part," he said.
"So, we really need to be looking at every lever at our disposal to mobilise the workers that will be needed to achieve this objective."
Housing Minister Julie Collins told Sky news it was an ambitious target, but the government was making progress.
"We know we've got a lot of work to do," she said.
"We know we've got an ambitious housing target, which is why we're getting on with the job.
"We're working right across government – I know the skills ministers had a meeting just over two weeks ago, where they talked about the skills required to meet the housing demand in Australia and the challenges we currently have."