A long-standing challenge in enabling social and affordable housing has been to establish a sufficiently large and continuous stream of funding that would ideally be predictable, sustainable, and responsive in catering to the rising demand. It is well understood that governments alone cannot cope with the increasing demand for social housing financing. Hence, it is imperative we look at innovative ways to fund this need with the collaboration of private institutional investors.

In the Australian housing investment scene, key barriers to attracting large-scale private institutional investments in affordable housing include scale; investment return; liquidity; longitudinal investor awareness; stable long-term government policy settings and transparency; and project pipeline capacity (Milligan et al., 2013). There has been debate over the past few years as to how substantial volumes of private finance could be leveraged into this sector. The most widely suggested approaches are the use of retail investment vehicles; tax relief targeting Community Housing Providers; rent-to-buy models; and shared equity models.