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Finance in Five
98 Plays4 months ago
In this episode of Finance in 5, we dive into the competitive property markets in Brisbane and Perth, discuss the ongoing debate about stamp duty discounts, and examine the impact of building inflation. We also share insights from the Living in Australia report, highlighting key factors like housing affordability, safety, and climate change.
Report that we mention:
https://content.id.com.au/living-in-australia-2024-community-views-report-download
Ready to explore your options? Get a free assessment from the experts at Hunter Galloway: huntergalloway.com.au
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Transcript
Introduction to Australian Property Market
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to this week's Finance in Five Weeks. Here's the latest in the property and finance market across Australia. We've got a huge episode today, back with all the latest info. So if you're looking at buying your first home, upgrading or investing, this is the episode for you.
Brisbane & Perth Property Dynamics
00:00:13
Speaker
Yeah, first up, we're going to take a look at the competitive property markets in Brisbane and Perth. If you're hoping to get a discount on a property in these cities, You might need to rethink your strategy. We'll have a look at why the market is so competitive and we'll offer you some tips on how to stay ahead. After that, we're going to discuss the ongoing debate with stamp duty discounts with prices on the rise. These tax breaks are getting harder and harder to secure, so we're going to explore whether they should be scrapped altogether and what it means for you as a first-hand buyer.
Navigating the Australian Housing Market
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Buying Your First Home Podcast, your personal guide through the Australian housing market. Here we tackle the big questions and the small details that come up when buying your first home. From financial prep to finding the right neighborhood, we're here to ensure that you've got all the knowledge at your fingertips. So let's take the first step towards unlocking the door to your new home.
00:01:07
Speaker
All right, let's get started. So first up, If you're looking for a discount on property in Perth in Brisbane, your chances are just about zero. New data is showing that these houses and units in these cities, they're selling faster than ever and there's very little room for negotiation. So if you're hoping to snag a property for less than the asking price in Brisbane or Perth, you're probably going to need to rethink your strategy. Yeah, the market dynamics in these cities have shifted pretty dramatically, making them a bit of a seller's paradise. So let's break down what's driving these trends and what it means if you're first home buyer or an
Competitive Offers in Hot Markets
00:01:45
Speaker
investor. So first up, let's have a look at Brisbane. So the average selling time for units in Brisbane is
00:01:52
Speaker
35 days at the moment and it's the fastest in Australia while houses are taking 42 days, which is the second fastest. So there's a lot of demand and it's a very competitive market. So if you're thinking about buying in Brisbane, you're probably wondering like, do I have enough time to decide? If you need to act quickly on a property, you might end up making hasty decisions or settling for something that's a little bit less than ideal. And we're seeing this on the ground um in Brisbane, we've helped a lot of home buyers. And last week I had someone frantically call me on Thursday saying, oh, there's a property, the agent's gathering all the best and final offers before 5pm Friday. Can I make an offer? How do I do that? What does it look like? And we sort of went through the terms and conditions, but agents are doing this more and more where they're not doing an auction as such. They're almost doing like a Dutch auction, you know, one behind the scenes where they're sort of getting all the different offers, handpicking and seeing who they're going to decide and who they're going to take. and
00:02:48
Speaker
In some cases, people are waving different clauses. Yeah, it's pretty wild. So when you're looking at markets like Brisbane and Perth, which we'll get to later, is very similar. If you're putting an offering on a house, there might be 10 or even 20 other people who are also putting in an offer. Your strategy there has got to be super different to a sort of quieter or slower market. If you think you can go in with a low-ball offer and you can take your time and really sort of work through the process, you're probably going to end up missing out. and A lot of people have felt that in the last couple of years in Brisbane.
00:03:20
Speaker
You've really got to go and put your best foot forward. We call it the elbows out strategy. you know Get in there, put in a solid offer, put in your best and final as soon as you put in your first offer. And that's kind of the best way to kind of tackle this sort of hot and heavy kind of market. Yeah, you need to be across the sales really. Like I had one the other day where the agent was asking for offers over $7.49. A client they'd been looking for almost two years. Like they won the property for $800,000. So it was $50,000 more than what it was on the listing, but that was the market. Like the agent was probably
00:03:52
Speaker
may have been underquoted a little bit online, but it's the market. And I know Perth, it's similar. Houses are selling in an average 30 days. They're the fastest among capital cities in India. It's taking 49
Strategies for First-Home Buyers
00:04:03
Speaker
days. So it's a similar thing where there's a huge pace, there's urgency in the market, and there's really a limited window if you're out there trying to buy to jump in and get the property. Yeah, so there was a property agent in the best realty group in Perth, Aman Singh. He apparently en listed a property in Armdale and within two hours of listing the property, they received an offer of $15,000 above the asking price, like two hours.
00:04:32
Speaker
bed Yeah, so, you know, circling back, you need to think about that elbows out strategy. If you're first home buyer, realize that you are competing with investors, so you need to be able to act quickly. You need to really have like your three suburbs drilled down. You need to be across the recent sales and you need to be ready to make an offer, kind of shoot first and then ask questions later. And the best way to do that is have your pre-approval. Have your numbers all signed off with a broker. We help out with that a lot at the moment, getting everything competitive. So then everything's all signed off the bank says, yep, Simon, you're good to go. You can make your offer. It's just subject to evaluation and yeah you're pretty much solid. And the other key thing here as well is a lot of people will sort of go and inspect a property and then they'll start to do their due diligence and start looking at
00:05:16
Speaker
whether there's any issues or there's flood risks or if there are other issues that could affect the quality of the property or their happiness in it. And if you're in a fast market, you really have got to sort of front load that work. So if a listing pops online and you look at the place and you think, yep, this looks pretty good. We'll go and check it out this weekend. In that sort of few days in between when you see the property and then when you go to the inspection, you should be running through your checklist of due diligence and making sure that it's something that you want to buy. You can check your flood risks. You can look at transportation, infrastructure. i mean You can even say what schools are in the area, public transport. Are there any things about the property that
00:05:59
Speaker
could concern you and get all that stuff out of the way. So if you go to the first inspection, you like it and you've got your pre-approval, then you can strike while the iron is hot, you know, get in there and put your offer in and sort of jump ahead of the people who would take a bit more time to do that. And that's the difference I see some people have been looking for two years and they might be four or five pre-approvals in. And some people that are just at the beginning of the journey and starting off. And I think the biggest differentiator is the people have been looking for two years have sort of narrowed down. They've missed out on properties. They've had their knees scraped a couple of times. They've paid for building and pest reports that haven't gone ahead. And so now as soon as a place comes up, like they're just jumping on it. They know, yes, this home, three bedrooms sold for this much last month.
00:06:42
Speaker
probably need to be here plus a couple of percent to secure the place. Whereas when you're starting, you don't really know. So we've got a bunch of checklists on our website. We'll include some links below to help with that because you need to be pretty certain and pretty definite in this market. One of the other things that's worth looking at as well is that there is a lot of interstate investor activity. So when you do see housing markets that are as hot as this, investors all across the country will be looking to buy in these areas. So they'll be looking specifically for types of properties that are good to use as investments, one that are in areas that are easy to rent that have
00:07:19
Speaker
a decent amount of like rents to houses to property owners kinds of ratios. you know There are some certain types of areas that investors are particularly interested in. And if you're a first home buyer, if you're trying to compete with them, then you're just competing with more people. So you can also select the areas that you're looking at to be ones that are less attractive to investors, but are still great for you to live in as well. So your local knowledge actually is a big advantage as well. Yeah, but I guess one concern as well is like, should I rush my purchase? I'm getting QP with missing out with investors. Am I going to miss out? And I'll probably hop back to that example of our clients that have spent the last two years looking. The market is literally up 20% over the 12 months. It's up even more if you sort of take a longer timeframe, but it's justs insane. so like
00:08:04
Speaker
potentially by sitting out, they've cost themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars and in that. But also no one knows what the market's doing moving forward. to We talked about it before, you know it's not timing, but time in the market. So if you're looking at buying a place, no one knows if it's going to keep going up over the next 12 months or slow down or what's
Expert Advice & Market Navigation
00:08:23
Speaker
going to happen. But if you take a 5, 10, 20 year view, if it's the right home for you yeah moving forward and you're going to be there for a long time, then time will be on your side really. Another thing to look at in this situation is to get some expert advice. Trying to do this alone in a challenging market is really just making things harder than it needs to be. so Looking at maybe getting buyer's agents to help out, if you've been trying yourself and you haven't really been able to find the right property, buyer's agents can be really useful to give you a bit of a leg up in the situation.
00:08:54
Speaker
The guys at Hunter Galloway, mortgage brokers, they've got tons of great advice. It's not just about getting a home loan. There's a whole bunch of things that are involved with the process that they can help with as well. So don't try and do it alone because you'll just be making it more difficult than it needs to be. Yeah, and I think having you know fully assessed pre-approval is one thing we're finding really helpful in the current market. It means that you can potentially go to auction. It's your choice, obviously. At auction, you're waving the finance clause, so you need to make sure the bank's happy with you. Nothing's changed. The property is what you're thinking. The body corporal strata, if you're looking at your unit, isn't a lot higher because that can affect your pre-approval.
00:09:30
Speaker
a new situation hasn't changed. So we help out a lot with that in that situation or situations where you might need to waive your finance clause. So you might have to do an offer under auction conditions that's on the market. Because like Simon said, you're competing against investors and those people might be cashed up going into Satan. They might be just throwing money down. So you need to try and find a way to compete without having to overpay. So I think that's two things. But Simon sort of, as you said, wrapping up, as I was looking at researching, what's some stuff that can help you out there with the market? In terms of research, the best thing is really the real estate listing websites to keep a close eye on things. So realestate.com.au, domain dot.com.au. If you're dialed into those, you can set up alerts on properties and areas that you're looking at buying. If you find one that looks good and you want to see where the market's really at, you can go into the sold listings. So look into the sold listings for the past, ideally three months or less because these markets move quickly.
00:10:27
Speaker
you can see what houses in the same area you're selling for. So you can do a bit of a quick comparison, see what they're really selling for, not just what the agents are telling you, and then you can get a better idea about where things are at. And that's probably one of the best ways to research the current market conditions.
Impact of Stamp Duty Changes
00:10:44
Speaker
They do have these property reports you can get from RP data. They're like a good baseline. They give you some information, but they're often a bit lagging in terms of what really happens in the market. so One of the common mistakes we see is that people will get an RP data report and they'll see that the property is selling for an estimated 750,000 for example, but that data is from sales that was six months ago and the market's moved on since then and they're not expecting the price that it actually sells for. So you need to combine a few different sources in order to get a more accurate picture about where the price is going to be.
00:11:21
Speaker
Not exactly. So moving on, scrap the cap. There's been a lot of changes now with the state budgets coming out ah around stamp duty. We're seeing two different states that have moved things around. New South Wales did some pretty big sweeping changes last year and then hasn't quite come up with the goods when they moved to sort of a land tax. So we're going to go through how stamp duty is affecting first-home buyers in this segment. So with property prices on the rise, tax breaks for a realistic price to get into the market are getting harder to secure. So it really begs the question, Simon, Should these first-time buy caps be scrapped altogether? Let's go through what's happening in the different states and what it means to you when you're trying to get in the market.
00:11:59
Speaker
Absolutely. Before we get into the details, in case some of our listeners aren't totally familiar, stamp duty is one of the costs of buying a house in Australia. So it's a form of revenue for the state and territory governments. In other places in other countries, or even New South Wales, they might have property taxes, which are like consistent yearly taxes. Stamp duty is sort of the replacement for that. So it's an amount that you pay the government when you hand over the house or when you buy the house and it gets handed over. And the higher the price of the property, typically the higher the stamp duty. And so it's a significant cost. So on a $600,000 property, stamp duty can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands, depending on which state you're buying in. And many states offer discounts or exemptions for first time buyers, which is what we're talking about today.
00:12:54
Speaker
And these kind of make it a lot easier to get into the property market. The discounts are subject to price caps though, which means that above a certain limit, you won't be getting the discount at all. And in between, there's like a grading scale of how much discount you can get. Yeah. And I guess that's the issue is like a lot of these caps and these amounts haven't changed in line with the property market. So Queensland has just changed their cap, their concession, but it hadn't changed for over 10 years or more. It was insane. So a lot of people are saying, well, property prices keep going up. The government's revenue is going up. Why? The tax, you know, the caps going up. Because like you said, Simon, you know, $700,000 property in Brisbane before the changes, it's like $20,000 in stamp duty, that upfront fee that you pay, that
00:13:38
Speaker
comes out of your savings, it's more time you've got to save up. But a lot of states do offer stem G concessions. Like I said, New South Wales had the annual land tax, they scrapped last year, they had it for like a six month period and it's gone away now now it's still an upfront fee. But stamp duty costs have grown four times for median house price in Australia compared to average income since the early 80s. So it's just insane how much it's gone up. So there have been some recent changes though Simon and a bit of reprieve there depending on the state. Yeah and looking at ah Queensland in particular, I mean you can kind of see why they've made the change. I mean it is an election year and they love to
00:14:11
Speaker
do some things for the voters when it's an election year which is one reason but I had a bit of a dig into the sort of the typical values of properties around the Brisbane capital city area and the only suburbs where you can actually get a house for under $500,000 in terms of the median house price are Maclay Island and Russell Island which are technically part of the greater Brisbane area, but they're not really what you consider a normal livable suburb. So the rest of the other suburbs that have that lower typical value, they're all units. You can't really get a house for under 500k anywhere in the greater Brisbane area at the moment. Yeah. And this is why they've increased the cap to 700,000 to accommodate that. So it's good, but there could be more changes, right?
00:14:57
Speaker
Well, I mean, the increase is good, but still less than half of the homes in Brisbane would qualify for the discount. So it's a question of whether they've actually gone far enough or maybe they should just scrap the price cap altogether for first home buyers. And maybe that's a more fair way to get first home buyers into the market without this additional financial burden. Yeah, because it's always a funny thing when they debate you know the average time to save a 20% deposit. It's always a headline out there. It takes you eight years, 10 years for the average salary to save up a 20% deposit. They don't actually include the stamp duty. So like you could save up a 20% deposit.
00:15:31
Speaker
on a $750,000 home, but then you've got to pay an extra 20 something thousand dollars, depending on the state, New South Wales and Sydney have different caps. But yeah, you got to add the stamp duty costs on top of your deposit. As a party savings, it takes even longer. So scrapping it would actually be a positive thing, I think, for first-hand buyers to help that affordability and help get in the market. I mean, at the very least, you think they might want to implement something like an indexation. If home prices are a median of X, then maybe the price cap should be reset every year to be related to the median price somehow. You know, waiting 10 years to increase a stamp duty levy when you look at it now seems kind of crazy. Like 10 years ago, house prices were way different and it's almost surprising that they've waited this long to take some action on this.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah, so let's see, I think this year being election year, housing affordability, new builds is going to be in the media more and more. So hopefully, more is done here. But as far as state specific updates, so we mentioned Queensland, you know, in Brisbane, the stamp duties waived for homes up to $700,000 now, effective from the 6th of June. And there's a discount between seven to 800,000. As of recording, they still haven't updated the calculator, so we're waiting to see what that looks like, but hopefully we should get that. And it's a similar story in South Australia too, so they announced about a week or two, the government's going to abolish stamp duty discount price caps for first home buyers purchasing or building new homes. So, you know, some big changes there. I think the calculators are waiting to update that too. Western Australia is also raised its stamp duty price cap by $20,000. Yeah, big jumps there. That's huge.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, to 450,000, despite median house prices climbing, I think per similar, like it's hard to get much from the 500 now compared to even 18 months ago. And Tasmania is committed to cutting stamp duty for home site up to 750,000. So replacing your previous 50% discount. So there's a bit being done there, but I think to your point, Simon, like When you've had 100 plus percent price growth in the last 10 years in all these places, it's not really keeping up with the market, is it? Absolutely not.
Housing Affordability Analysis
00:17:30
Speaker
And further to that point, the next thing we've got to discuss here is kind of some good news for first home buyers, depending on where you are. For the first time since 2021, housing affordability has improved.
00:17:43
Speaker
So it means that the amount of income that you need to meet the average loan repayments is actually a little bit lower now than it has been in the previous quarter. And that's the first time for the last two years. Every time before that, it's been going up and up and up. It's a bit of a mixed bag though. Jayden, let's have a look at this data. It's from the Real Estate Institute of Australia and there is some interesting insights here. Yeah, so the proportion of income required to meet the average loan repayment fell by 1% to 46.7%. So that's really off the back of stronger wage growth. So there's been a couple of increases, union minimum wage has gone through and a bit of a pause with interest rate hikes. So obviously saw 13 hikes in a pretty short succession.
00:18:27
Speaker
put a little stress there. So at least there's a bit of a slight relief for budgeting for first-home buyers. And I guess the positive is the first improvement since all the increases from March 2021 to December 2023, where the proportion of income required to meet the average loan repayment peaked at 47.7%, which is pretty wild. It does unfortunately depend on where you are living though. So affordability has improved in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT with New South Wales seeing a drop of 2.2%. But in South Australia, the affordability is basically stable and Queensland, Western Australia and Northern Territory have actually seen a decrease in affordability. So it's not across the entire country where the affordability is improved. So back of what we've been talking about in Brisbane and Perth, there's no real surprise there.
00:19:18
Speaker
but Northern Territory was an interesting one for me. I didn't consider they'd have a drop in affordability based on what I know about their property market. Yeah. Then the debate goes, well, should you just keep renting you if it's that unaffordable to own home and buy it and you can sort of get into a big long-winded debate about the pros and cons of each. but I guess just looking at the affordability point of view, the proportion of income required to meet the median rent increased unfortunately by 0.5% to 24.4%. So rental affordability worsened across all states and territories with Tassie actually seeing the highest increase by 0.7%. So despite better conditions for buyers in I guess Tasmania and a couple of states like renters are feeling more pressure as landlords are passing on
00:20:00
Speaker
those interest rate increases and shows a bit of a, you know, the challenge between sort of, you know, transitioning between the two and you're gonna have to keep paying your rent, trying to save at the same time. Yeah, it's always a tricky one there is if you are renting and hoping to buy and rents keep on going up, which means you can save less, you kind of get into a difficult situation. so Renting affordability has been an issue for a while and it's unfortunately probably not going to improve in the short term as far as the rental supply is and everything else. So I guess if you are in the situation where you are renting and really hoping to buy a place, I'd be thinking about looking at what are some ways where you can sort of change up your rental situation. Like perhaps if you're in a bigger house and you have a spare bedroom, looking to get an additional housemate to spread the costs is one way to do it.
00:20:50
Speaker
even some people move back home with their parents for a couple of years so they can put that money they'd be renting towards saving for a deposit. These aren't things that really anybody wants to do, but sometimes in situations like this, you've got to kind of look for alternative ways to achieve your goals. So that's kind of the downside of where we're at the moment with the rental affordability. And I guess you'd just hope to see what we can do here to improve that. yeah Yeah, hopefully with some of the state budgets as well, New South Wales was aiming to build another 20,000 dwellings or at least previously sort of government held land. So hopefully that increased supply will filter through this. Interestingly, like the number of first-home buyers decreased by 17.9% over the quarter, but increased by 8.3% compared to the March quarter of 2023, so year on year. So I think some of these changes will probably put more first-home buyers in the market because definitely I know what we're seeing in Brisbane. like that's
00:21:46
Speaker
$20,000 that you're saving or $18,000, $17,900 or something like that on a $700,000 purchase. So it's good and bad. Like it means people that previously might have been capped to a lower purchase price at 550 can now get to 700. So it means they can sort of stretch more, but it might mean there's going to be more people competing over those properties, pushing the market up. So it's a bit of a good and a bad thing. So looking at the cash rate, the Reserve Bank kept interest rates on hold at 4.35%. And they're sort of saying, they're waiting and seeing, and depending on what happens with the economy, with unemployment, and even some of the government stimulus later in the year and how that's going to go through. So good and bad news as I'm and sort of wrapping up this section, like housing affordability is looking slightly better depending on where you live, but you know, rental affordability is getting more challenging too at the same time.
00:22:32
Speaker
Absolutely. And I suppose one of the other things to consider, which we've sort of covered in the past as well is, you know, if we're seeing better affordability in some of these other regions, and if you're not locked into staying in whatever state you're in, looking interstate for purchases is another great option as
Rising Building Costs & Market Impact
00:22:49
Speaker
well. You know, sometimes having a bit of a change of scenery can also make the housing more affordable as well. All right, so hold on chat folks, building inflation is set to rise again. Oh my God. So could potentially, you know, building costs are going to impact a lot of things from housing, rental supply to infrastructure projects. So rising wages, increased demand for materials and a push for just more green technologies is kind of pushing these prices up. So let's dive into what it means if you're a first home buyer, if you're looking at the market or some people even looking at getting at the bill with some of those incentives out there, what's going to happen?
00:23:26
Speaker
Well, according to the Oxford Economics Australia report, the infrastructure cost escalation is on the rise again because of this increased domestic demand. So the consumer inflation is remaining fairly subdued, which is what the ah RBA looks at when they're setting interest rates. The construction sector is kind of its own different beast. You know, the pressures there and the way that costs work, they're kind of separate to the mark in Australia overall. so It's been like this for a while, like the really it start in the pandemic and in the post pandemic because of a lot of the infrastructure projects from the governments. The costs have increased 10% year on year in sectors like roads and ports, which doesn't sound like it's got anything to do with housing, but ultimately the people who are building the roads and the ports are also some of the people who are building homes, you know, they're of the same job pool.
00:24:15
Speaker
So the big factors influencing this are the home building ramp up. There's price bargaining agreement changes. And like we said, you know, there's greener technologies. So it means, you know, you've only got so many people that can fill this job pool. They're getting paid more to potentially do the jobs. Like you said, Simon, at an infrastructure level and they're pulling away from the home projects and it's going to keep pushing these prices up, which is I guess a bit frightening too. Absolutely. And one of the other concerns I think for a lot of people who are like in the middle of a build or even thinking about building is these project delays. If you're starting and you're building a home and you think that we've done in six to twelve months or whatever the builder tells you and then it sort of spans out to three years, that can be a massive concern. One of my cousins, her husband and her, they built a house and the build was supposed to take about 18 months and it ended up taking three and a half years and those sort of things just
00:25:08
Speaker
they can really blow out your costs and they can cause a lot of issues. And it's a legitimate concern that people looking at building a house are probably facing at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. So I think wrapping up this bit, like if you are thinking about building, just realize that construction costs are potentially on the up. You want to where possible will get a fixed price contract, but the big risk and the people I'm talking to today who are saying, oh, I'm looking at building in six or 12 months, you may need to factor in these costs escalations because you can sign a contract on some land today. It might not be ready to build on until early next year. And even if the builder's quoting you today, they're not going to be able to honor the prices there. So be prepared for that. Onto our last segment.
00:25:44
Speaker
The Living in Australia report is out. So it's some interesting insights into how Australians feel about critical aspects of life, housing safety and climate change.
Australian Views on Housing & Environment
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's right, Jayden. So you know how I sometimes just find some weird sources of information. This report is from a company called Informed Decisions. So these guys mostly sort of work with councils and other local governments to provide them information about, you know, how their council on their local areas doing in comparison to others and what's happening in their individual place in terms of demographics and everything else. But this report in particular, they basically surveyed the views of over 5000 Australians and kind of just dove into like, what are the most pressing issues that are affecting our quality of life? And what are people overall in Australia feeling about some things? And I thought there's some pretty interesting stuff here.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yeah. So housing affordability is the third most important factor in livability with 52% of Australians listening in their top five up from 46%. So it's a pretty big jump sort of as a concern, there's like guess interest rates and the cost of living's biting. Yeah. And the average capital city house price is now 11.4 times the average annual full-time earnings. Compared to three point three times in nineteen eighty four so it's a pretty big concern about affordability you know jayden we're from the eighties vintage my parents bought a house in the early eighties and their house is maybe hundred and eighty one hundred and twenty thousand dollars i don't remember the exact amount but it was cheap.
00:27:22
Speaker
Nowadays for the same house, you'd be looking at adding on a maybe five times that. So the changes here have just been so rapid that affordability is just a big issue and young people and renters are particularly affected. So 66% of 18 to 34 year olds and 68% of renters place a very high importance so on affordable housing. Yeah, I found the next point safety being interesting. So safety is a top attribute people value in the local area with 63% listening is one of the most important factors. You know, the concerns is the area I'm considering safe, you know, women place a high importance on virility and safe 67% versus 58%. And this is a pretty interesting one because we did an episode a couple of weeks ago on the Brisbane property market.
00:28:06
Speaker
And one of the parts or one of the data points we looked at was the highest sort of crime suburbs in Brisbane, in the top five. It's not a nice that you want to look at, but it's something that I'd never really considered before. But it's probably important if you're looking at a home or looking at an investment even, I guess, as a future saleability aspect, like it's worth considering this factor, given it's the top attribute people look at in their local area and could influence your bi-pool in the future or yourself. If you're going to live there, obviously you don't want to be worrying about locking up the doors and charging your cameras and having you the police on speed dial. Absolutely. Another one of the top concerns here is the cost of living pressures, which probably comes as no surprise. So 59% of people cite cost of living as a major issue in their local area.
00:28:52
Speaker
And young Australians are, again, ones that are feeling it the most with 68% of them identifying this as a top issue. So there is a pretty noticeable drop in terms of the spending that these demographics are doing. So less importance placed on shopping, leisure, and dining experiences, because and obviously those are the luxuries. And when you're worried about the cost of living, you're not spending money on those kind of luxury kind of categories. so There is actually though, some kind of good news here as well is that while the cost pressures are significant, there is some improvement in terms of optimism about financial circumstances. So 28% of people are expecting better financial conditions in the next year, up from 23% in 2023. So there is positivity there, which I think is great. And it's probably warranted considering where things are going in some degrees with interest rates and some of the other sort of wider economic things that are happening in the country.
00:29:51
Speaker
yeah Yeah, and the last point, and we'll include a link to the report below, but climate change is a big concern as well, with 9% of Australians acknowledging its occurrence. and The interesting part of this is more how climate change will affect properties. It depends on the region, but like extreme heat being a major concern in urban areas, flooding, a major worry in northern New South Wales. bushfires, potentially coastal erosion, some of the stuff on some of the places down on the beach. So again, another thing to think about when you're investing in a property, when you're looking at buying your home, you want to be doing these reports and even getting insurance quotes. I've seen cases of properties that are in flood zones. Those insurance costs aren't going down, unfortunately, so it could impact your property and your livability, obviously, in the future. So that's most of it today. Let's kind of wrap up today's episode and go through the key points.
00:30:42
Speaker
Yeah. All right. So first up, we had a quick look at kind of the state of the property market in Perth and Brisbane. As we said before, if you're hoping for a bargain buy in either of those two cities, you're pretty much out of luck. You definitely need to take more of an aggressive strategy in terms of the way that you're negotiating when you're looking to buy in those areas. We had a quick little look at the stamp due discounts, like what they are and are they doing enough to keep up with what's happening with the property purchase prices? Next up, we had a little look at housing affordability and how it has improved for the first time since 2021. So good news for people in a few of those states in Australia and building costs, they're on the way up again, thanks to some major infrastructure projects and a few other sort of economic dynamics there. And finally, we had a brief look at
00:31:32
Speaker
what people living in Australia find the most important in terms of their lives. Huge episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, leave a comment. We'd love to hear if you need any help with your finance or just wanting where to go. Hit us up at huntergalloway.com.au. We're home for home buyers across Australia. Until next time, we'll see you guys.