Joining the dots on affordability

This week is Budget Week for New South Wales. There's still time for the Berejiklian Government to announce the forgotten part of their housing affordability package - the one that tackles Sydney's high rents. So far they've covered tweaking taxes and grants in favour of first home buyers over investors, and fast-tracking supply. But they've left off any policy that would directly affect the rent.

As we've noted before, the shift of incentives from investors to first home buyers is designed to have the strongest impact in the market for newly built properties. We've also previously noted that while the majority of investors do not purchase newly built properties, there has been a significant increase in investor driven demand lately for off-the-plan units. It is worth considering how this change will impact demand for new dwellings over the next few years.

Understanding your standard first home buyer is no easy task. We can go back to the ABS Feature Article from 2012, First Home Buyers in Australia, which tells us that just prior to the height of Australia's post-GFC first home buyer boom there were about 430,000 of them over the three years to 2010. Driven by stamp duty concessions and the Rudd Government's First Home Owner Boost that put either $14,000 and $21,000 into their hands depending on whether they bought an established or new home, slightly less than one-fifth of them bought a newly built property during that time. In the three years prior to that, when the grants were not quite so generous, there were around 320,00 of them with less than one-tenth buying off-the-plan.

This tells us that first home buyers do seem to respond to stamp duty concessions and direct grants, but just like their investor counterparts they are much more inclined to buy established properties than newly built ones. Of course, this is based on how they behaved in the bad old days when property prices were merely exorbitant, but the latest Digital Finance Analytics' Property Imperative Survey suggests these numbers remain in the ballpark - they've identified 330,000 first time buyers in their March report, noting that 80% are buying or intending to buy an established dwelling. But we must note here that an increasing proportion of these first timers identified by Digital Finance Analytics are investors, so they are buying another person's home rather than their own.

Now that prices are scandalous, it remains to be seen if anything much will change after the tweaking of stamp duties and grants. It is possible that 100% of Sydney's first time buyers will rush to the new apartment market to see what they can afford, since the houses they'd evidently prefer to buy are still likely to cost too much. But it's just as likely many will continue to rent the homes they want (or can afford) to live in. Either way, the removal of incentives for investors to buy off-the-plan is likely to see them withdraw from the new apartment market, and this wont be completely offset by any increased demand from first home buyers. Construction activity may well start to fall away in response. If that happens, no amount of rezoning to fast-track supply will save us from the plague of rising rents - assuming it ever could.

This brings us back to the forgotten part of the NSW Government's housing affordability package. Given the recent Federal Budget foreshadows a new Affordable Housing and Homelessness Agreement requiring the states to consider affordable housing targets, along with an Affordable Housing Finance and Investment Corporation that will provide a funding mechanism for the supply of new sub-market dwellings, the Berejiklian Government would do well to adopt planning and zoning reforms along similar lines to those announced by the NSW Opposition a couple of weeks ago. In the face of their own affordability package that might otherwise reduce demand for their services, this could be just the tonic our developers will need - to say nothing of our neighbourhoods and communities who are already crying out for some downward pressure on rents.