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The group’s chief executive, Andrew Coronis, has questioned whether the federal government’s initiatives are enough to combat affordability.
Mr Coronis said the program, which was expanded at the start of the new financial year to include 40,000 places, appears to have shifted the affordability battle away from saving for a deposit to servicing a mortgage.
“Housing values are expected to decline as interest rates rise,” he said.
“Whilst this will lower the deposit threshold for buyers, it won’t necessarily make housing more affordable to own.”
Mr Coronis compares the current scheme to the federal and state home owner scheme that was in place when he purchased his first home in 1989. At that time, the government support equalled $7,500 – or 14 per cent of the $55,000 property’s value – with this fee provided as partial payments to reduce debt over a five-year period.
Mr Coronis believes the reason why “we are already witnessing distressed sales as people simply can’t service their mortgages,” is due to the fact that home values are 8.5 times higher than the median national household income, according to Corelogic’s Housing Affordability Report from March 2022.
He would argue that the “root of the issue is limited supply of affordable housing and registered land to build on.”
“Whilst we welcome the introduction of Federal and State Governments’ policies to deliver more social and affordable housing for vulnerable people in our community, it is simply not enough to meet the overall demand,” he added.
A new report from the Australian Housing and Urban Research institute (AHURI) found that 6.1 per cent of Australians currently live in or have requested to live in social housing, a figure that far outweighs the number of current available spaces.
Mr Coronis said this collision of supply shortages and demand surges can be seen throughout Queensland, where record levels of interstate migration in 2022 – 50,000 according to the latest census – have plunged the state into a rental crisis with vacancy rates of 0.7 per cent in May.
He has called for the Queensland government to take a similar approach to that seen in 2015-17, when the state approved many high-rise developments aimed at enabling developers to deliver more high-density housing in urban areas to ease the barrier of entry for buyers and provide more affordable options for tenants.
“Coronis is proud to support the development industry in lobbying the Government to release land and titles to make it more affordable for people to build and live in the communities that we serve,” he concluded.
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