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.

Technorati Tags: property, house, home, Australian dream

At the moment in the Australian media there is a huge outcry about the housing affordability crisis. Some stats I heard on the radio yesterday say that only 39% of houses are affordable now in comparision with 96% in 2001. Where I live in the north of Brisbane there is a group of houses where a high rate of crime was reported. I went for a walk there the other day and began to think to myself what’s happened that the present state of affairs has come to this. Looking at the big cities of the world like London, New York or Paris it would seem that this is not a new problem for them. Housing affordability may have been a luxury in Australia for years but now it’s a luxury that I know I can’t afford.

How does one cope with these realities? A bit further north from me there were groups of families using the exhibition grounds as a temporary accommodation because they couldn’t find homes to rent. In the Philippines there are entire shanty towns built out of rubbish and left over bits of metal. A positive for me is that I can say, “at least I can afford it.” However, I cannot see anytime soon that I won’t be renting. I have never owned my own home and if things keep increasing then I probably never will. Thank God I can afford to rent but that is not really much of a comfort when you are kicked out after the house is sold. I mean we have lived in eight houses in the past eleven years. In this last five years we have moved five times.

It’s not all bad though. When I can eventually afford a house at least I can say that I know what I like. Although I still dream of owning a home it will be many, many years before I can afford it (given present trends). Are you in the same boat?

Technorati Tags: housing affordability, London, New York, Paris, Philippines