Revealed: Govt set to scrap grants to help first-home buyers onto property ladder | Newshub
Revealed: Govt set to scrap grants to help first-home buyers onto property ladder | Newshub
Pull up the ladder after you.
Edit: I didn't realise National said they'd keep these before the election. When Bishop got asked about it he said "that was then, this is now". What a bunch of fucking crooks.
I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand these types of subsidies ultimately just drive up prices further, same as when interest rates go down. People can pay more so prices move up.
On the other hand, in the absence of doing anything to drive landlords out of the market (and of course this government is doing the opposite of that), removing support like this just gives them yet another leg up to speculate on housing at the expense of people who just want a place of their own to live in.
Is there any evidence that subsidies drive up prices? This seems like one of those economic deepity like "rising tide lifts all boats".
There absolutely is, however, $5k is pretty minimal so I'm not sure it's measurable in this case.
In general, with a bit of a lag, when people can borrow more because of low interest rates, house prices shoot up. When people can borrow less, house sales plummet (people don't tend to sell when they can't get what they paid for it, so sales fall instead as people stay put - though prices will fall a bit as some people will still need to sell but buyers won't have much to choose from so they don't fall back to where they were).
Stuff had a good article on this a while back (perhaps 2 or 3 years) where they compared I think average mortgage payments based on average interest rates for average houses each year going back 20 or 30 years, and I think it was adjusted for average wages as well. But do you think I can find it? Of course not.
Certainly in Australia they do
Australian governments spent more than $20.5 billion on first home buyer help in the past decade, which made housing affordability worse by driving up property prices and left existing homeowners richer, new research found.
That's a shame, it was a big help to me and my partner. About 20% of the deposit!