APN System Friction Index™
The APN System Friction Index™ is designed to read how much administrative and planning-system friction slows residential development and property transactions nationally: approval timelines, process complexity and variation between jurisdictions. Higher readings would mean more friction.
It is a planned component of the APN Risk & Compliance Index™ (24200), alongside regulatory enforcement, credit rationing, mortgage distress and household insolvency. The index composes on those four components until this one has a data source, and then recomposes with five at equal weight.
No national, consistent series exists for planning and approval friction. Assessment timeframes are published state by state, in different forms and over different periods, and several collections carry licence conditions.
- State planning performance data. Development assessment timeframes are published separately by each state; combining them needs a consistent definition of a determination and a common period.
- The Productivity Commission’s housing supply regulation inquiry. Its final report, due in March 2027, may establish a national measure of approval timeframes.
- How it would read. Once a source is settled, the component is standardised against its own history like the other four, and the parent index discloses the change of composition in the quarter it occurs.
The other components of the APN Risk & Compliance Index™ (24200).
