Australia’s property boom making the nation poorer

[nitrene]

It is believed the property last sold as an empty block for approximately £300 in the mid-1950s, according to the owner’s children.

Nice investment there 300 --> 2520000, a nice 8400X move in 70 years. Actually its only a 13.77% compounded annually but still pretty good.

Looks like Australia is like California here in the US. I'm sure the UK & NZ are in the same boat.

Here in the SF bay area you see the same craziness. I believe a 2 bedroom house in Palo Alto that hadn't been updated in like 30+ years sold for $4 million. The new owners tore it down and created a luxury estate from it. It was land they were buying.

 

[vanzandt]

The new owners tore it down and created a luxury estate from it. It was land they were buying.

Building at $375/sqf new is dirt cheap compared to $250 old. The $625 (plus demolition) paid will go for $750 plus in the right location if the market is hot and the investor/builder knows the market and has a good handle on it. But timing is certainly key.

 

[themickey]

A dozen first home buyers miss out on one-bedder in ‘hot pocket’ of Redfern
By Tawar Razaghi July 6, 2024
https://www.smh.com.au/property/new...in-hot-pocket-of-redfern-20240704-p5jr1t.html

51/32 Rosehill Street had a price guide of $735,000. Thirteen buyers, almost all first timers, some with the bank of mum and dad behind them, registered to bid on the home.

It was in a highly coveted location not only for being within a few steps of the train station but also in the heart of the fast-growing South Eveleigh precinct.

An opening bid of $700,000 quickly started the auction and rose even faster from there in $10,000 bids as five parties placed offers. It flew past the $800,000 reserve until the hammer fell at $873,500. It sold to the only bidder who was buying it as their second property but plans to move in.

It was one of 677 homes scheduled to go under the hammer in Sydney on Saturday. By evening, Domain Group recorded a preliminary auction clearance rate of 72.9 per cent from 442 reported results, while 86 auctions were withdrawn. Withdrawn auctions are counted as unsold properties when calculating the clearance rate.

The home measured up at 81 square metres, but buyers were drawn to its location.Credit: Peter Rae

Selling agent Brad Gillespie of The Agency Eastern Suburbs said it was a hotly contested property due to its location.

“It’s on the doorstep of the station and the South Eveleigh precinct and has become a hot pocket,” Gillespie said. “It’s more location than anything else.”

The home last traded for $500,000 in 2012, records show.

Redfern’s median unit price rose 0.3 per cent in the year to March to $953,000 on Domain data.

In Annandale, a three-bedroom terrace at 177 Young Street sold for $1.94 million to a young couple who only set foot inside the home for the first time at Saturday’s auction.

The pair had missed out on another auction earlier that day when they walked into Annandale home which had no price guide yet drew five registered bidders – all young couples who were mostly upgrading.

The auction started at $1.8 million and went up in only a handful of bids thanks to two buyers before the successful buyers placed a single $20,000 bid and walked away with the keys. The reserve was $1.93 million.

Selling agent Tina O’Connor said the couple had never set foot inside the home before Saturday morning.

 

[themickey]

What people look like when they know they're about to be stung by RE agent.

 

[tony.m]

Thousands of homeless need to camp outside the state and federal parliaments, only then the things will change.

This is the opposite of what is happening is AUS
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/27/travel/gotene-sweden-land-sale-krona/index.html

 

[themickey]

Thousands of homeless need to camp outside the state and federal parliaments, only then the things will change.

This is the opposite of what is happening is AUS
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/27/travel/gotene-sweden-land-sale-krona/index.html

The truth of the matter, politicians will build if they want to build, and they wont build if they dont want to build, instead, covering their asses with lies, excuses, distractions, stalling.

Take Israel, a little country wanting Jews to immigrate from all over the world, they build settlements like no bodies business. Their main business other than technology is agriculture.

Australia, land of plenty, has everything under the sun.
More spare land than anywhere on earth.
Full of the homeless and couch surfers, buy a shitbox 1 bedroom for a million bucks.
Average rents $500-$600pw.

 

[vanzandt]

The truth of the matter, politicians will build if they want to build, and they wont build if they dont want to build, instead, covering their asses with lies, excuses, distractions, stalling.

Take Israel, a little country wanting Jews to immigrate from all over the world, they build settlements like no bodies business. Their main business other than technology is agriculture.

Australia, land of plenty, has everything under the sun.
More spare land than anywhere on earth.
Full of the homeless and couch surfers, buy a shitbox 1 bedroom for a million bucks.
Average rents $500-$600pw.

Wait till Elon goes into the de-desalinization business and turns your billion sqm's of wastelands into gardens of Eden.
~mark the post

 

[themickey]

Wait till Elon goes into the de-desalinization business and turns your billion sqm's of wastelands into gardens of Eden.
~mark the post

The business leaders in Australia are brain dead.
Digging holes and exporting dirt to China is what we are only capable of, oh, and selling land to overseas buyers.
Buying a house for young local people sends them into slavery for most of their working life.

 

[themickey]

The latest distraction gummint dreamt up was going after Coles and Woolworths supermarkets because they're getting too big and price gouging.
Yeah right, housing inflation is running away and homeless people increasing, so gummints new priority is make a song and dance about supermarkets who might be charging an extra 10c for a cabbage or 2L of milk.

Meanwhile gummint as usual will do nothing about either, other than create deliberate noise to feed to the sheeple in order to distract them.

 

[themickey]

Ordinary workers ‘can’t keep up’ with mortgages, rent and bills – even with multiple jobs

By Shane Wright July 7, 2024
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...-even-with-multiple-jobs-20240705-p5jrdw.html

Australia’s “working poor”, including people holding down two or three jobs, are inundating financial counselling services as a combination of high mortgage interest rates and inflation leave them struggling to make ends meet.

A phone hook-up last week of counsellors from across the country heard harrowing stories as those with mortgages and people trying to keep a toehold in the rental market seek help to cover their repayments or find a way out of economic distress.

Calls to financial counsellors are soaring as housing costs - mortgage repayments and rents - hit working Australians.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Up to 500 people a day are using these services, many for the first time, with the number contacting the National Debt Helpline up by more than 40 per cent since the Reserve Bank started lifting official interest rates in May 2022.

Financial market analysts believe there’s a one-in-three chance the Reserve Bank will use its August 5-6 meeting to lift the official cash rate to a 13-year high of 4.6 per cent. On a $600,000 mortgage, another quarter percentage point increase would lift monthly repayments by $100, taking the cumulative increases since early 2022 to more than $1700.

As repayments have climbed, so have rents risen by about 15 per cent nationally over the past two years.

Growing mortgage repayments and rents, on top of broad inflation, are forcing hundreds of thousands of Australians to seek financial help.

Through the first six months of the year, the National Debt Helpline received more than 78,630 calls – the highest since 2020 when the pandemic forced the closure of many businesses. Calls have climbed by 41.3 per cent since the same period in 2022 when mortgage rates were around 2.5 per cent and rental inflation was flat.

In May alone, calls were up 51 per cent on their 2022 level with more than 500 a day being taken by counsellors.

Online chats, favoured by younger people, have hit record levels, climbing 40 per cent over the past year.

Tania Clarke, the Consumer Action Law Centre’s director of policy and campaigns, said housing costs were the single largest issue.
“A couple of years ago, the people we were hearing from had something go wrong, like they’d lost their job and there had been a death or something like that,” she said.

“Interest rates and the cost of living have just caught more and more people, and their incomes have just not kept up. More and more people are working two jobs, they’re cutting spending but can’t keep up.

“We’re now seeing low- and middle-income people, they’ve reached the end of the road and they need help.”

Previously, a person unable to pay their mortgage would sell their home and return to the rental market. But counsellors are finding the surge in rents has closed off this option.

Apart from housing costs, callers to the debt helpline report a growing number of problems paying council rates, utility bills and credit card or buy now, pay later debts. There has also been a lift in people, usually small business operators, struggling to pay tax office debts.

Over the past year, the number of people holding down more than one job has climbed by 30,000 to a record 974,000.

The biggest increases in average mortgages over the past year have been in Queensland, up by 12 per cent or $63,300, and Western Australia (up 15 per cent or $68,000). Calls to the debt helpline are growing fastest in these states.

Australians are cutting their discretionary spending and focusing only on essentials as cost of living bites.Credit: Trevor Collens

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows households slashing expenditure, often on necessities, to deal with the cost pressures.

Spending by NSW households fell by 0.6 per cent in the year to the end of May, in Victoria and Western Australia it dropped by 0.3 per cent and in the ACT it slumped by 3 per cent.

NSW households have slashed their spending on discretionary goods and services by 3 per cent while Victorian households have cut it by 2.1 per cent.

A spokesperson for Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the stage 3 tax cuts, its $300 energy relief payment, reduced medicine prices and paid parental leave were aimed at easing stress on households.

“We know people are doing it tough and being hammered by cost of living pressures, which is why we’re rolling out cost of living help from this month,” they told this masthead.

But shadow treasurer Angus Taylor said Australians were hurting because of the government’s economic failures.

“Families are in recession, we’re seeing record business insolvencies and a record number of people working multiple jobs to make ends meet,” he said.

The National Debt Helpline can be contacted on 1800 007007.