Beyond stamp duty concessions, what else could be done, quickly, to boost attractiveness for potential buyers?
🏢To recap, a new, moderately sized, modest spec 3-bedroom apartment circa 110m2 needs to sell at: 💵~$1.5m in Melbourne 💵~$1.6m in Brisbane 💵~$2.2m in Sydney given current construction inputs/imposts to make #apartment development feasible.
(For context, for roughly half those amounts, homebuyers can obtain a greenfields house or middle ring townhouse with more internal space. And ignoring that a household income of almost $300k would be needed to borrow $1.5m, assuming you have saved the 10% deposit)
✅Remove the deposit hurdle
Similar to double the price, double the duty – double the price = double the deposit!
The deposit hurdle – collecting 10% of the purchase price – can be a bigger barrier to purchase than borrowing the balance. There are State and Federal programs such as the First Home Owners Guarantee which can reduce this to 5% (or 2% for single parents); however both the price and the income ($200k household) thresholds are too low to let this work for buyers of apartments at above price points.
Caps would need to be substantially raised or eliminated entirely to make such measures work.