Speculative Vacancies 2025 Data Update

Prosper Australia’s 2025 Speculative Vacancy data update delivers a snapshot into the extent of unoccupied housing in Melbourne.

The report counts empty and underused dwellings for 2024 based on average water usage over the calendar year.

The data update reveals a 16% rise, to 31,890, in totally empty homes in Melbourne over the past year. This rise in empty dwellings has undermined the benefit from the new housing supply coming online.

Vacant properties highlight inequality and how housing supply is held hostage by speculative incentives driven by tax structures that reward unproductive asset holding and penalise productive activity.

Taxing vacant homes and land, as pioneered in Vancouver and recently expanded in Victoria, can push more properties into use. However, broad-based land taxation is less intrusive and cumbersome than vacancy taxation and can more efficiently accelerate land development and nudge housing into use.

Data highlights:

• 31,890 dwellings remain completely empty: utilising water meter data, Prosper Australia’s latest count of empty homes reveals a 16% rise in homes with  
• Underused housing remains high: dwellings that recorded less than one-quarter of the average single-person household consumption over the calendar year, dropped slightly to 69,055, bringing the total to 100,945 dwellings or 5.2% of all homes in metropolitan Melbourne.
• Squandered potential: Melbourne added enough totally empty homes last year to effectively wipe out one in every nine new dwellings.

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