Property Council of Australia NSW Executive Director Katie Stevenson said while many councils are lifting their game, there were still too many examples of local planning authorities taking too long to determine relatively simple development projects.
"We're just over a week into the five-year National Housing Accord period and, with 377,000 new homes to deliver by 2029, there's no time to waste," Ms Stevenson said.
"The Premier announced in his Bradfield Oration in November last year plans to publish housing completions in comparison to other States - a kind of league table that will help to deliver a faster, more certain and transparent planning system.
"Urgent release of this league table is imperative so that newly elected councils can hit the ground running with a clear understanding of their performance and the improvements needed, and to help maintain NSW's profile as an attractive environment for investment.
"Introducing greater performance monitoring into the planning system is a sensible step to turbocharge state and local government assessment of new housing projects and see how we are tracking against our interstate counterparts," she said.
Ms Stevenson said there were still too many examples across the state of minor developments taking too long to be determined by planning authorities.
"One project in Ku-Ring-Gai to build 14 new homes on the site of an old nursing home has been refused after 545 days of deliberation.
"Small and straightforward developments like this ought to be determined in small and straightforward timeframes.
"Allowing planning authorities to churn over the same application for years isn't going to bring us closer to delivering on state or local housing targets.
"The housing crisis is real, and it is time that applications were processed with the level of vigour and velocity that matches the urgency of the need to deliver new housing," Ms Stevenson said.
