Every buyer wants prices to go down, until they purchase. They can’t wait to go and tell everyone how well they’ve bought. I remember something a senior leader in the real estate industry said to me many years ago during a surge of international buyers in Sydney. These buyers were winning at auctions, beating locals and people were up in arms. This leader said to me “everyone dislikes foreign investment, until they’re selling and then they’re all for it!” This catch cry of fixing intergenerational wealth and helping people get into the market is fabulous.
But should it be through going after yesterday’s first home buyers? Last year the federal government gave a very generous and incentivising stimulus package to first home buyers. In hindsight they should have stepped it. The modelling seems off. They lifted the ceiling from $750,000 in Brisbane to $1,000,000. What followed was that the market prices mirrored the incentive and prices rose significantly. So now these buyers, the ones we fought for last year, are seemingly yesterday’s news. They took the step up and now they’re reading headlines about removing competition to make real estate more affordable.
Ironically it’s last year’s first home buyers that will be the most affected by this budget in the short term and the tenants in the chapter after that. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth. It’s the same for all those property owners that now own investments in central locations or nice homes in cosmopolitan suburbs. Most of them didn’t start their property journey at that house or in that location. They likely started miles away from there, in a house or unit that was far less glamorous. They did that with the intention to create wealth. Not at the expense of someone else, but off the back of their hard work and/or risk.
The body and the top of the Brisbane property market is predicted to still climb, the entry level will also show growth but those buyers who purchased off the back of government incentives last year are right in the crosshairs to be the most affected by these changes. It doesn’t seem right to me.
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