Over breakfast yesterday morning I was watching Sunrise, a local morning show. They had a man from Melbourne talking about property ownership from a perspective that I wasn’t familiar with. His core argument was that leasing (and he conceded) and renting were better than owning. He cited some examples which you can read here of the going rise in costs that I think show the overall trend in this country. What interested me was that he was a lessor and said, ‘this side of the grave I will not own a house even though I have owned five of them!’.
I was gobsmacked! This was an interesting point of view because it’s a common, if not unmovable, dream in Australia to own your home. It’ called the ‘great Australian dream‘ here at to be honest it’s now out of reach of more people than it has ever been in the history of this country. The point that got my attention the most was that putting your money into a managed fund or stocks may actually get you better financial returns. Several factors like: maintenance, rates and the like were cited as on-going expenses. I have to admit as I have before… the place I am living in now is fairly dodgy! As a renter I wonder about the future of something that may or may not be sustainable.
There is a lot of rhetoric about it being a sound investment but in closing this short post I would like to point out that homeownership is a dream for a lot of us. It’s the intangible desire to have a place we can call ‘home’ that is somehow built into our psyche. That goes beyond sound economics and is something else entirely.
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