House prices are record high, and with the unavailability of government assistance in the form of the first-home buyers’ grant for existing homes, first-home buyers are being pushed over the edge of the cliff to extinction. The availability of the first-home buyers’ grant only for new home buyers is practically of no use and as such goes in favour of the builders as they jack up the prices by a similar amount.
The share of first-home buyers in the property market fell to 12.3 per cent in April, a record low set in November, according to recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Low interest rates and changes allowing people to buy property using their superannuation are flooding the market with investors, making the situation of first-home buyers even more precarious.
With the interest rates at a record low, investors are having no mortgage stress and as a result are not putting their homes on the market because with high rents, their mortgage payments are lower than the mortgage repayments. Having no affordable existing homes for the young families, in the market the only option they are left with is going for new off-the-plan projects, which are over-priced and beyond their means. For example, even one room apartments are being marketed at prices over $4600,000 in Parramatta.
High rents are further helping to eliminate the prospective first-home buyers from the market by eating up a major chunk from their pay packets and leaving them with nothing to save even for the initial deposits.
The government does not seem to be doing anything for this endangered species of first-home buyers.
Published in Indian diaspora magazine, Sydney
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