Seachange Treechange - Create the lifestyle you want to live

It is the greatest social impact of the pandemic. It is the phenomenon of working from home.
At the 2021 Census 21% of the Australian workforce worked from home. Five years earlier this proportion was 5%. WFH skyrocketed in the lockdown cities of Sydney and Melbourne where this proportion reached 39% and 29% respectively.
In the smaller, freer (at the time) capitals the proportions were lower: 18% in Brisbane, 10% in Adelaide, 8% in Perth and 7% in Hobart. In the lifestyle towns of Castlemaine and Byron Bay the proportion was 26% for both.
WFH peaked amongst the late 30s and early 40s but in reality, there was uplift across all age groups. Some industries were predisposed to WFH such as for example, financial services & insurance where in 2016 some 6% of workers worked from home; in 2021 this proportion jumped to 66%.
The CBD and inner-city living is still popular. It’s just that many workers now want something different.
Of course the need to WFH has subsided since the August 2021 census and so peak figures will have subsided. But it is also likely, in my view, that this proportion will rise in Adelaide and Perth to the extent that the capital city workforce might well converge on, say, 15% going forward.
This represents a 10-percentage-point uplift on the long-term average and takes 1.3 million commuters off the roads.
Australians are suited to WFH. They value the lifestyle enhancement WFH delivers. The Millennial generation aged late-30s/early-40s is now looking for family-friendly lifestyle homes, with a Zoom room.
Plus, the Australians have ‘form’ in the pursuit of lifestyle. We invented suburbia at scale. We embraced seachange and treechange and, more recently, apartmentia.
WFH in a lifestyle zone is simply the next iteration in the Aussie obsession with lifestyle. WFH is here to stay in a hybrid, moderated, “converging” form based on the proportions captured by the 2021 census.
See page 18 The Weekend Australia $5 p/w .australian .com.au