{"id":55941,"date":"2025-09-10T21:03:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T21:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/55941\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T21:03:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T21:03:11","slug":"worrying-trend-for-bargain-hunting-first-home-buyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/55941\/","title":{"rendered":"Worrying trend for bargain-hunting first home buyers"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s getting harder and harder for first home buyers to get a foot in the door of the housing market, as the remaining “affordable” properties left grow in price faster than the rest.<\/p>\n

Affordability constraints are driving buyers towards cheaper homes, resulting in dwindling options for younger Australians, a report released by online property marketplace Domain on Thursday found.<\/p>\n

The effect was being borne out across most major cities.<\/p>\n

Since 2022, the cheapest quartile of homes in Sydney has grown 4.1 percentage points faster than the top quartile.<\/p>\n

The difference was 6.9 percentage points in Melbourne, 13.6 percentage points in Brisbane and 19.8 percentage points in Perth.<\/p>\n

The phenomenon has exacerbated already falling home ownership rates among young Australians.<\/p>\n

More than 68 per cent of the population born between 1947-51 owned a home by the time they were 30-34, but today only half of Australians in that cohort own a home.<\/p>\n

Domain chief economist Nicola Powell says government policies that boost demand for homes, excess construction regulation and stamp duties were exacerbating the problem by pushing up prices further.<\/p>\n

Governments should consider replacing stamp duty, which has risen three times faster than income since 2000, with a broad-based land tax, Ms Powell said.<\/p>\n

“You’ll be hard pressed to find an economist that doesn’t think that stamp duty is a terrible tax,” she told AAP.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s so inefficient.”<\/p>\n

\"Buyers
\n A lack of affordable homes is pricing young buyers out of the market. (Mick Tsikas\/AAP PHOTOS)<\/p>\n

Because it adds to the upfront cost of a property transaction, stamp duty acts as a disincentive for people to buy and sell homes, even when their current home is the wrong size for their needs or in an inconvenient location.<\/p>\n

“One of the things with our housing market is we have a big misallocation of housing, which means that we are not using our current housing stock efficiently,” Ms Powell said.<\/p>\n

“By removing stamp duty, what it should do is encourage right-sizing of our homes.”<\/p>\n

For people trying to get on the property ladder, stamp duty means there are fewer smaller, entry-level homes.<\/p>\n

And for young couples planning on starting a family later in life, it encourages them to look for a home larger than their current needs to avoid transaction costs down the track.<\/p>\n

So if the economic consensus is behind getting rid of stamp duty, why is it still entrenched in nearly every state and territory?<\/p>\n

\"A
\n State governments are reluctant to give up the massive revenue raised from stamp duty. (Dean Lewins\/AAP PHOTOS)<\/p>\n

The issue is state governments are so heavily reliant on stamp duty and ditching it would leave a massive hole in their budgets until more efficient land taxes contributed enough revenue to make up the difference.<\/p>\n

Ms Powell said it would be politically unpalatable to bring in land taxes without grandfathering home owners who recently paid stamp duty on a new home.<\/p>\n

It would mean essentially “double-dipping” them in tax.<\/p>\n

“I think if we were going to see a broad-based stamp duty reform, it needs to have federal support” to bridge revenue gap for states, she said.<\/p>\n

Productivity Commission modelling singled out stamp duties as “exceptionally economically damaging taxes”, chair Danielle Wood told the National Press Club in August.<\/p>\n

She noted there were “thorny transition issues” around moving to land taxes but did not have a position on whether the Commonwealth had a role to play in incentivising the states to get rid of stamp duty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s getting harder and harder for first home buyers to get a foot in the door of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[9,79,1063,179,18,1831,19,1826,17,5,1828,1827,1829,1830,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-55941","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-daily-news","11":"tag-economy","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-global-news","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-inkl","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-news-app","19":"tag-news-headlines","20":"tag-news-today","21":"tag-today-news","22":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}