The new survey, conducted by Resolve Strategic for this masthead, shows 63 per cent of Australians now believe that the young will never be able to buy a home, compared to 57 per cent a year ago.
Coates said the fact that people’s real incomes have fallen to where they were in 2010 was also affecting how much first home buyers could put towards a mortgage “because the costs of the essentials they need to buy has gone up faster than their income”. Seventy per cent of respondents supported “rent to buy” schemes – where renters have the right to buy their accommodation at the end of their lease – while two-thirds of respondents supported investing government funds in building housing and planning regulations to force new housing developments to include a proportion of low-cost housing.
“Housing is a ticking time-bomb in the sense that it is going to create an enormous amount of political angst for governments in the year or two ahead.” Home-buying hopeful Kiandra McDonell, 28, said she and her friends felt the property market had become almost impossible to navigate. “I’ve had friends talk to me and be like, ‘Hey, do you want to go in together and buy a house?’”Chris Hopkins