The Chinese government is curtailing outbound investment. While this will affect the Australian property industry, the rest of the economy should be unaffected.
Declining home ownership among young people has implications for their long-term financial wellbeing and indeed for the retirement income system.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Individual households in Australia, on average, own 83% of all investment dwellings rented to private tenants or resold. They are people who usually have another main source of income.
Vacant and unlit ‘ghost’ apartments are a source of public outrage in major cities around the world.
leniners/flickr
A tax on empty homes will make a modest difference to housing affordability. The sheer wastefulness of our housing system calls for something much more ambitious.
Interest rate adjustments are crude and fail to target the problems within the housing market.
Shutterstock
A variable special rate on new residential housing developments in selected centres could be used to create a local incentive to supply more affordable dwellings at higher density.
Southport station, Nerang Street, soon after the light rail began running in 2014.
Matthew Burke
The light rail project pushed up property values within 800 metres of the stations by over 30% from 1996 to 2016. Gains on this scale offer a potential source of finance for public transport.
Tackling housing affordability will be a priority for the Federal Government in the 2017 budget.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
When people do downsize, financial incentives are generally not the big things on their minds. And so most of the budget’s financial incentives will go to those who were going to downsize anyway.
The vast majority of cranes are used to build apartments.
AAP Image/Paul Miller
About 84% of cranes in Australia are used on residential sites, with commercial projects making up 5% of crane activity. Health, education, infrastructure and recreation projects make up the rest.
At least ten cents in every dollar of superannuation assets is indirectly financing house purchases via commercial bank debt.
AAP/Lukas Coch
What critics of the plan to use superannuation for housing miss is that Australia’s super system already channels a significant proportion of retirement savings into housing.
A blockchain’s ability to move assets from one owner to another allows less dependence on intermediaries.
www.shutterstock.com
We now value the house as a wealth builder, not just a place to live in and raise a family. The result is a distorted investment market that makes home ownership and rental unaffordable.
Chinese cranes might soon be a common sight through Asia.
Shutterstock
As domestic construction slows, Chinese property developers are starting to look overseas. The potential impacts are diverse, from property prices right through to regional diplomacy.
These units in suburban Parramatta were built as part of the 2009-12 national Social Housing Initiative.
Gethin Davison
Do affordable housing projects drive down property values? Does neighbours’ quality of life suffer? Case studies in Brisbane and Sydney suggest such fears aren’t justified.
The problem with the current rezoning approach is that it leads to huge windfall profits and developments aimed at the upper end of the market.
AAP
The community needs affordable housing and that requires meaningful targets for new developments. The only ones who will lose out are landholders who make windfall profits from rezoning.
Private developers in China have been increasing their debt levels, research shows.
Reuters