AirBNB has turned vast numbers of houses into hotels/short stay accommodation, pushing local ordinary people out of the local housing market, especially in popular tourist towns.
Australia sells its residential real estate to any buyer from anywhere around the world - which results in millions of empty houses, and locks Australian's out of owning houses.
Australian politicians have huge property portfolios, so they have incentive for all the above mechanisms to stay in place.
The Australian government does not build any substantial number of public houses any more.
Australia has a vast flow of foreign students into our universities and the unspoken transaction is that if you buy the education then you also get a permanent resident visa, putting pressure on housing.
The current Australian government - the ALP - has a "huge Australia" policy and is importing 715,000 migrants this year and next, with 1.5 million overall for the next five years - despite what the government says, these people need somewhere to live.
Negative gearing is made out to sound much worse than it is. If anything, it's a benefit to wage earners by allowing them to pay a business expense from their pay. It's just a standard deduction afforded to investors for business expenses.
IIRC it's actually quite difficult for foreign buyers to get into the market, and expensive as well.
The housing vacancy rate is lower than ever. There definitely aren't millions of empty houses.
Largely the issue is just going to be too many people and not enough houses where they are needed. The more liberal we are with permitting apartment and unit construction, the better things will be in the long term. I'm not sure restricting migration is the solution - but you can definitely argue that the rate is too high.
The 2021 Census reveals that 10.1 per cent (1,043,776 homes) of Australia’s 10,318,997 private dwellings were unoccupied on the night of the Census. While this may seem that a very large proportion of Australia’s housing is unlived in, the reality is dwellings are identified as unoccupied for a number of reasons such as:
homes are being renovated
homes being sold as vacant possession
newly built or bought homes where no one has moved in yet
rental homes awaiting new tenants
people living away temporarily from home during the census count (travelling or visiting other homes)
homes are deemed unliveable
subject to a probate application or other legal proceedings
holiday homes
homes owned by people currently living overseas
homes being land banked, that is held vacant until the local area economics (or personal circumstances) make it more profitable to sell or redevelop the property.
Had there not been the tax concessions, those property investors might've not invested in the first place, and thus, there would be an even lower baseline - the gov't's $20BN that they supposedly saved would not have made up for the shortfall either.
I rather the gov't give back the tax dollars in that case. And nothing stops an investor from making a company, and using that mechanism to negatively gear - unless somehow the proposal specifically targeted real estate.
People in australia complain about high property prices often think it's negative gearing causing it - but it's not. Australia is full of rich people, and high income earners. That's why property prices are high.
On this note, I find it increasingly infuriating to keep coming across people who blame all housing shortage issues on eeeeeevil investors and landlords, and spout a lot of bullshit about massive vacancy rates that don't exist, when the blatant root supply-and-demand cause is that there's just not enough physical housing in the places that people want to live.
You see exactly the same kind of stuff endlessly parroted in the US by people who somehow think that confiscating property from all landlords will make the millions [1] of needed housing units just manifest out of thin air.
Much of that resembles the UK situation. I wish MPs received more scrutiny for their property purchases, the best we've had so far is when the open corruption of their expenses came out.
I presume you mean Australia. Here is how we got here:
The government pays money to property investors/landlords via negative gearing.
The government gives tax incentives to property investors/landlords.
Australia excludes real estate from money laundering - making it a prime destination for proceeds of crime from China, Russia and many other places, driving up prices. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/09/wides...
AirBNB has turned vast numbers of houses into hotels/short stay accommodation, pushing local ordinary people out of the local housing market, especially in popular tourist towns.
Australia sells its residential real estate to any buyer from anywhere around the world - which results in millions of empty houses, and locks Australian's out of owning houses.
Australian politicians have huge property portfolios, so they have incentive for all the above mechanisms to stay in place.
The Australian government does not build any substantial number of public houses any more.
Australia has a vast flow of foreign students into our universities and the unspoken transaction is that if you buy the education then you also get a permanent resident visa, putting pressure on housing.
The current Australian government - the ALP - has a "huge Australia" policy and is importing 715,000 migrants this year and next, with 1.5 million overall for the next five years - despite what the government says, these people need somewhere to live.