http://www.smh.com.au/business/property/homeownership-dream-dims-for-gen-y-20100421-ssdp.html
More young Australians see themselves as lifelong renters as the dream of home ownership fades, a new survey has found.
“We have never seen such pessimism amongst prospective first-time buyers throughout the past five indexes,” Vittoria Shortt, chief executive of Bankwest Retail said. “Seventy per cent of respondents were very concerned about the level of debt they will be committed to if they buy a property.”
One in three generation Y respondents, those born between about 1980 and the early 1990s, said they expect to be permanently locked out of the housing market.
I am one of them.
There are some interesting things to be said about this:
1. I honestly expect never to be able to afford a house.
As it currently stands, the bank will lend me $194,000 to buy a house. On that sort of money, it is impossible to buy anything within the Sydney Basin. To this end, I have for about the last 12 months been looking for employment in another state. I figure that I'm more likely to be able to own a house in Adelaide than Sydney.
The scary thing is that I wrote about this six years ago:
Generations Y & E therefore face a really huge challenge. No job security, the prospect of being priced out of home ownership and paying rent forever (to the Baby Boomers), living in debt from age 18 (to be educated) and above all, having to listen to their retired parents say "it wasn't like this is our day". Sadly it means that the most childish and selfish generation in history will never grow up and their kids will be too old to listen to them.
- HORSE 98 - 22/04/04
Also scary was that we were told this by The Age two years ago:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/02/28/1203788539246.html
THE average Australian family can no longer afford the average home mortgage, according to new figures that paint a devastating picture of how unaffordable housing has become in capital cities like Melbourne.
2. I honestly expect never to see any sympathy.
Why should anyone ever even care about my plight, or even the plight of our generation? As far as Governments are concerned, their largest single chunks of voters are still the Baby Boomers. Generations X, Y and Z (who can't vote yet), aren't numerically large enough to make any difference. Secondly, Generation Y is more than likely to be paying rent to the Baby Boomers, or by virtue of the fact that the Baby Boomers still live in their homes, are locked out from buying them.
3. What's wrong with Pessimism anyway?
I mean what is the point believing that things are going to be OK when their clearly not? As the population increases, the demand for housing is going to get tighter; as the Baby Boomers get older and start to have serious health problems, they are going to want to withdraw their capital from financial markets which is going to drive the costs of money even higher; therefore the criteria under which money is lent in the first place is also going to get tighter.
Also, over the past 10 years especially, there has been a trend from owner/occupier dwellings to institutional investment. Thus, if investors increasingly are coming from even larger pools of money such as superannuation funds and banks outright, this should tend to force out smaller entities. This of course leads to an increase in house prices and thus unaffordability, which is borne out by real world statistics.
So if you decide to tell me that "you had it hard in your day" or that "things will get better" then Nuts to You; what a load of bosh. If you are an older person, you probably had a shot at owning your own home and/or probably do so, but things are certainly not going to get better.
And don't you dare tell me that as a generation that we "had everything given to us" because I most certainly did not.
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