why is the housing market in Australia so bad?
In: Economics
After boomers got their houses, a trend arose to ‘play the property market’ and constantly seek after bigger and better houses. So they started proposing, and voting for, policies that would (among other things) restrict the amount of new land available for development – thus driving up the value of their homes. The focus shifted from ‘just living in your home’ to raising it’s value. This is a bit different from previous generations, that usually didn’t care so much about how much their house was worth on the market – because they planned to live in it for their lifetime and pass it on.
It doesn’t help that multinational companies buy up many houses to turn into rentals, since this limits the left-over available pool of houses for first-home buyers, thus driving up the prices even more.
It doesn’t help that one of the two main political parties base virtually their entire platform around encouraging more of these things – focusing on ensuring property and stock-owning boomers gain ever-more optimal value from the assets they own already, rather than helping people all the people who don’t own anything at all.
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