Housing crisis: Baby Boomer tax cut could help first home buyers
And they believe one more win for the nation's most successful housing generation could be part of the solution to getting more younger first-home buyers into the market.
The Real Estate Buyers Agents Association of Australia have called for Aussie homeowners aged 60-plus to be given a stamp duty concession for purchases worth up to $1m, to encourage them to downsize from larger homes.
It would effectively assist Baby Boomers initially, with the generation now aged from 61-79 years old.
Acting REBAA president Zoran Solano said stamp duty was a key barrier that was stalling many of those who were considering such a move.
'While some states offer concessions for pensioners, the thresholds are outdated and don't reflect current market price points,' Mr Solano said.
'It's unfair that someone in their 70s pays the same transfer duty as a 30-year-old.
'And for a lot of them it would remove another hurdle and make the overall process smoother.'
Acknowledging that Baby Boomers had already had a good run from the housing market, with Finder stats showing that in 1984 it cost 3.3 times the average Aussie wage to buy a home — compared with 10 times the typical income by 2023.
They've also enjoyed significant growth in the value of those homes as interest rates have trended downwards, allowing prices to push up more rapidly than many past eras.
'So, yes, they have been fortunate in the growth that they have experienced, but nothing is stopping the next generations from saving hard, working hard and doing the same thing over their lifetime,' Mr Solano said.
And, giving Boomers a discount on their stamp duty to downsize, would potentially help younger buyers to make a move.
The buyer's agent said anywhere from 25-30 per cent of his clients were downsizers, and many needed to achieve specific outcomes from the sale of their home to ensure they were set up to avoid relying on public healthcare systems as much as possible as they aged.
As a result, he estimated there would be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people aged 60 plus who might well consider a downsize if the tax burden was reduced for their next home — which would free up more family-sized homes in desirable suburbs for sale, or development into more affordable home options.
Mr Solano noted that in one instance recently he'd helped a NSW-based downsizer to purchase a home with a plan to downsize — but when they couldn't sell their existing home for quite enough money, they had walked away from the plan and still resided in their old residence.
'And with a stamp duty discount, she probably would have gone ahead,' he said.
Another downsizer he had worked with recently sold the 1200sq m block they had been living on since the 1990s to fund their purchase of a three-bedroom unit, and to top up their super.
That had made the home available to a family that would make wider use of the home, or potentially could have led to a developer purchasing it and turning it into multiple more affordable homes.
Mr Solano said the latter outcome was the most advantageous, as many downsizers were competing with first-home buyers for more affordable townhouses and units — so increasing the volume of them available would help reduce that competition and price growth.
The national property buyers advocacy group is not the only one to make the big call.
The Real Estate Institute of Australia also called for a last-home buyer scheme including stamp duty reductions to incentivise older homeowners into freeing up homes for sale and development.
President Leanne Pilkington said the proposal had merit given stamp duty could be north of $100,000 for some downsizers, and that it could have a significant impact on the housing market and overall affordability.
For those concerned about futher benefits to a generation that had already had a lucky run on the property market, Ms Pilkington said after having done nothing for a lengthy period the time to try something different was upon us.
'This is potentially an exceptional strategy for freeing up property in the middle rings,' she said.
'So it's what do you prefer? Things to just stay the way they are, or would you prefer governments explore what might be possible with regards to the housing crisis?'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Australian
2 hours ago
- The Australian
Anthony Albanese denies Donald Trump ‘snubbing' him amid meet worries
Anthony Albanese has denied Donald Trump is 'snubbing' him amid growing concerns in both Australia and the US that the two leaders have not yet had a face-to-face. The Prime Minister did a morning media blitz on Tuesday to champion a host of cost-of-living measures kicking in. But with Australian products still slugged with US tariffs and concerns AUKUS could be on the rocks, his relationship with the US President dominated. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has denied US President Donald Trump is 'snubbing' him. Picture: Martin Ollman / NewsWire / Nicolas Tucat / AFP Appearing on Nine's Today, host Karl Stefanovic put it to Mr Albanese that Mr Trump 'couldn't give a rat's about meeting with you'. 'I think it's so disrespectful,' Stefanovic said. 'And why don't you just tell him to bugger off?' But Mr Albanese took a different view, insisting he has a 'respectful' relationship with Mr Trump. 'No, not at all, and we've had really constructive discussions,' he said. 'I've been respectful of the President and I must say that he's been respectful of me as well when he rang to congratulate me on the election.' Mr Albanese added that he'd had 'constructive discussions with members of the US administration, as have my ministers'. 'But the President has a view about tariffs – it's different from Australia's view and it must be said that it's different from past presidents' views as well,' Mr Albanese said. 'And what most economists realise, (is) that free and fair trade is a good thing for the world and America has benefited from that.' Mr Albanese said he had 'a right to represent Australia's national interests', and Mr Trump 'has a right to adopt his America First policy, as he calls it'. Pressure has ramped up on Mr Albanese to secure a meet after his scheduled bilateral meeting with Mr Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit fell through last month. On Monday, two of the staunchest supporters of the US-Australia alliance in Washington urged Mr Albanese to visit the White House. Republican representative Michael McCaul and Democrat colleague Joe Courtney are co-chairs of a congressional working group on AUKUS. Mr McCaul said Mr Albanese going to 'the White House would be a great gesture on the Prime Minister's part, that I think would go over very well'. 'That would be very sound advice for him to do that,' he told the Australian Financial Review. Without a Washington trip, Mr Albanese's next most-likely opportunity to meet Mr Trump is at the Quad leaders summit tipped for September.
The Australian
3 hours ago
- The Australian
Smarter strategies to tackle tech's biggest questions
Technological advancements are happening at pace, but organisations can make the biggest impact by focusing investment in the right areas. NTT DATA has partnered with The Australian to show how businesses can make strategic technology decisions for their future. Organisations of all sizes, across a range of industries are battling with the same big technology questions: How can we safely incorporate AI at scale? And how can we strengthen our cybersecurity resilience? They're questions that should be at the top of any CEO's agenda, according to NTT DATA ANZ CEO David McKeering. He said that while businesses were facing other challenges – such as global economic volatility and a tight labour market – the importance of technology has drastically changed in the past two years. This is due to the widespread adoption of AI, where technology can now be an organisation's competitive differentiator. 'The unprecedented rate of change means that the role of the CIO is critical – they need to lay out a technology strategy that enables long-term organisational success, as well as protect a business against a cybersecurity breach, which can have a long-lasting impact on the business,' Mr McKeering said. 'Many clients that we're working with today – whether government or private enterprise – are trying to navigate the board's expectation to move at speed by leveraging the benefits of AI, especially agentic AI. 'They are doing this while being challenged by the limitations of existing technology infrastructure that, unless upgraded, does not allow them to fully realise the cost and value outcomes from AI.' Mr McKeering explained that in cybersecurity the question the board wanted to know was 'Could this happen to us?' He said having the right processes and cyber resiliency in place is critical to be able to answer that. He added that the key to a successful technology strategy today was to plan and invest in good technology foundations. This is often around core platform infrastructure that can then be the engine for long-term innovation, and allow the speed of adoption of new technology and resilience from emerging risks. In most cases this will involve a critical review of the end-to-end technology 'stack', and stress-testing where the possible limitations or pain points are. 'When we do this, we often see a long-term underinvestment in infrastructure provides the most risk in enabling innovation. For example, legacy infrastructure may be the constraint to moving from innovative proof-of-concept AI projects to large-scale AI deployments,' Mr McKeering said. TRUST IS KEY No matter the industry, or size of an organisation, its ongoing success is built on a level of trust, Mr McKeering said. 'For any organisation that provides a service to a community or to another business, as soon as the trust piece has gone, their value to that client starts to erode,' he said. To bolster this vital sense of trust, cybersecurity needs to be at the forefront of all systems.' Cybersecurity is not just a point in time,' Mr McKeering said. 'It's continuous across everything that we do in business.' He said that by focusing on protecting data and intellectual property, an organisation is safeguarding themselves from the fallout of a cyber attack. 'For every CEO or anybody in any sort of position in a company where you're managing not only the data, but the intellectual property, you're focused on customer trust. 'No one is exempt from this, from the biggest enterprises, to the government, to the small and medium enterprises as well. Cyber security is a critical part of showing you are a safe business to partner with.' WHY AI WILL NEVER BE SET AND FORGET AI – and now more specifically agentic AI – is being embraced globally as a new way to bring value through competitive differentiation and cost efficiencies. But Mr McKeering warned that a successful AI strategy would always involve people. '(It's important) that ideas generated by AI are vetted, refined, and then guided by human review, and that ethical consideration is taken around what's appropriate.' He said that if organisations did this well, there were incredible opportunities – and not just for efficiency gains. 'We are seeing clients starting to use AI in the development of new services or products, which has introduced new revenue streams,' he added. But Mr McKeering warned that while using AI in this way might be tempting for a lot of organisations, it was always crucial to keep the end user in mind. He said that by partnering with NTT DATA – an organisation with global expertise, strong local presence and extensive research in the best ways to use AI – business leaders could get support when making these critical decisions. 'We can use predictive analytics, so clients can anticipate outcomes about any new services before they hit the market.' These insights are drawn from global learnings, as well as extensive investments in research and development, enabling NTT DATA to provide effective technology strategies for each organisation they partner with. 'We focus on the business outcome that our clients are trying to achieve, and work with them to use technology as an enabler to get that outcome,' Mr McKeering said. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ NTT DATA is a trusted global innovator of business and technology services and is committed to helping clients innovate, optimise and transform for long-term success. Register to attend the Ignite Roadshow now or visit NTT DATA. Read our policy on commercial content here. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Australian
3 hours ago
- The Australian
Fast food chain GYG is aiming for world domination
Guzman y Gomez, the Mexican-inspired fast food chain started by an American in Australia, wants to disrupt the global restaurant market and overtake McDonald's to become the best and the biggest. It's an ambitious goal, even for the $2.9bn listed company, which has become the poster-child for disruption in the fast food industry by flipping the switch on the standard quick service restaurant (QSR) formula by focusing on fresh food at low prices. The business, which opened its first restaurant in Sydney's trendy inner-city Newtown in 2006, currently operates 257 stores across Australia, Singapore, Japan and the US and this year broke the billion dollar revenue mark. Locally, GYG continues to outperform the overall QSR category, reporting 9.4 per cent sales growth, while the category declined. The Mexican-inspired fast-food business is not shy about its plans to become No 1 – it wants to open 1000 restaurants across Australia, and continue to grow its presence in Singapore and Japan, where it currently has five and 21 restaurants, respectively. GYG also wants to keep expanding in the US, where it will open its seventh restaurant soon and plans to have 15 in the next few years. The ambitious growth strategy is unsurprising to anyone who has spent time with GYG founder and co-CEO Steven Marks. The native New Yorker is bursting with passion and infectious ambition, which, along with a laser focus on quality and customer experience, has been embedded into every layer of the brand and product. 'GYG is fast food for this generation and you can see that in our revenue growth and our comp sales growth – the numbers don't lie,' Mr Marks told The Australian. 'We only have 250 restaurants, that's it. McDonald's has 30,000, Chipotle's got 4000. So we're really just getting started, even though it's been 20 years, it's just the beginning,' he said. GYG's growth strategy is grounded in its commitment to fresh food and the business claims to be the nation's biggest buyer of avocados, Roma tomatoes and free-range chickens. Mr Marks has focused on ensuring that all of GYG's food and ingredients have no added preservatives, artificial flavours, colours or 'unacceptable additives', all while maintaining great flavour and taste. He's passionate about this positioning and ensuring the brand is transparent about its food and ingredients. 'The foundation of GYG since day one is that we will never, ever compromise on the quality of our food or our people,' he said. This focus is evident in the business's unwavering focus on the customer experience and the role of its culture within that. GYG's onboarding process sees every new employee, regardless of their title, spend three days working in service in one of the restaurants. The aim is to ensure that everyone in the business has an appreciation of the customer experience, said GYG chief marketing officer Lara Thom. 'It gives you an absolute appreciation of how hard the frontline teams work, and it gives you an insight into who we work for, not who works for us.' Ms Thom has been with the business for almost a decade and runs a 40-strong marketing department with an in-house advertising agency model that enables the business to pivot and react in real time to market dynamics to engage with consumers. While she credits Mr Marks as the brains behind some of the brand's most successful marketing taglines such as 'Clean is the new healthy', and 'GYG is fast food your mom says yes to', both of which are direct quotes from him, she's crafted a global marketing strategy that not only optimises and amplifies the brand values but ensures those values are embedded in every touch point of the consumer experience. 'Clean for us was not a food trend or a campaign, it was our philosophy on food and we just happened to amplify a message that was core to our business,' she said. 'A lot of brands have their moment in the sun and then they grow up and they grow out of the demographic that they first appealed to. 'The strength of GYG is knowing exactly who we are and who we're not. And that means we will always ensure that we appeal to the generation of now, and I think that's really crucial. Our strategy is to constantly appeal to that generation so that once we have someone who loves the brand, they will grow with the brand.' To achieve this, GYG has worked to ensure it turns up within people's lives, from sponsoring school sports programs to its restaurants at university campus, and its integration with food delivery platforms, where GYG burritos rank as one of the most delivered products in Australia, as well as its own GYG app, which accounts for 21 per cent of GYG's total revenue. 'Other brands have their moment in the sun but they don't have a long-term strategy or vision. They focus on chasing revenue today, or this week, or this quarter, or next year, but the vision of what the brand needs to be in 20 years hasn't been set. They're so busy banking the dollars now, they're forgetting about what's next. For us, it's very clear what's next and what the future brings because the brand is clear,' said Ms Thom. Mr Marks agrees. 'We have a saying, 'Are you good enough to get better?' At GYG, everything's about hunger, humility and curiosity. What you see in a lot of these big traditional players, they're so arrogant and they've become very complacent. For us, everybody's on the same bonus plan, the same long-term incentive plan, this is a high-performing team,' he said. GYG's impact on the market is unmissable, but with such significant and ambitious growth plans, can the Aussie-grown business continue to shake up a category that it has already disrupted? 'Disruption isn't something we think about, it is part of our DNA,' said Ms Thom. 'It's part of our mission, the vision, the values of the company and the business. 'It's quite easy to latch on to that because it permeates throughout the entire company.' 'We've transcended being an Australian brand and we're now a global brand that just happened to start in Australia.' Mr Marks agrees. 'That's what people can't get their heads around; even as a public business, people say, how can this thing be worth $3bn? They don't realise, man, this is going to be the best and biggest.' Danielle Long Editor, The Growth Agenda Danielle Long is the editor of The Growth Agenda. She joined The Australian in 2024 after two decades covering the marketing, media and advertising industry for specialist publications in Australia, Asia and the UK. The Growth Agenda Rideshare brand DiDi has launched a provocative advertising campaign as it aims to take on Uber and grow its share of the market. The Growth Agenda The impact of AI on the advertising and marketing industry is an opportunity for the market to get back to what it does best: creativity, according to WPP global creative chief Rob Reilly.
