Assisting first home buyers: an international policy review

Abstract

Related reports and documentsInquiry into financing first home ownership: opportunities and challenges https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research-in-progress/Inquiry-intofinancing-first-home-ownership-opportunities-and-challenges AHURI AHURI is a national independent research network with an expert not-for-profit research management company, AHURI Limited, at its centre. AHURI's mission is to deliver high quality research that influences policy development and practice change to improve the housing and urban environments of all Australians.Using high quality, independent evidence and through active, managed engagement, AHURI works to inform the policies and practices of governments and the housing and urban development industries, and stimulate debate in the broader Australian community. AHURI undertakes evidence-based policy development on a range of priority policy topics that are of interest to our audience groups, including housing and labour markets, urban growth and renewal, planning and infrastructure development, housing supply and affordability, homelessness, economic productivity, and social cohesion and wellbeing. AHURI Limited also gratefully acknowledges the contributions, both financial and in-kind, of its university research partners who have helped make the completion of this material possible.The authors are grateful to Saul Eslake for providing the historic data on first homeowner grants used in Section 6. Thanks are also due to UNSW and University of Sydney colleagues, Honorary Professor Vivienne Milligan, Dr Rebecca Edwards and Dr Kadir Atalay for their contributions to the report. We are also grateful to CoreLogic for kindly providing access to original statistics informing graphs in Chapter 2.The team is also indebted to the many academic, professional and government colleagues in Australia and in our seven comparator countries whose expertise informed our work, but especially to our country expert academics:

Sustaining rural pharmacy workforce understanding key attributes for enhanced retention and recruitment

“…This study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia and challenges associated housing affordability and availability may have been exacerbated disproportionally by the lack of housing available in rural communities during this time due to unprecedented purchase and movement of people to rural regional communities. 41 Similarly, recruitment was enhanced and hindered in different communities during this time. Another possible limitation, despite the robust development of the tool, 11 may be that the factors were limited to 50 and other factors may exist that also impact pharmacist workforce.…”

Pathways to home ownership in an age of uncertainty

“…In supporting home owners specifically, home purchase subsidies had existed in various forms since 1964, and were finally eliminated in 1990 (Bourassa, Greig et al 1995). Critics of these schemes suggested that the impact of these grants were to bring forward first home owner purchase for those who would have purchased anyway (Paris, Beer et al 1993;Pawson, Martin et al 2022), thus having little impact on long term trajectory and rates of home ownership.…”

“…There are a variety of models that place differing emphasis on rights and responsibilities of those involved, divisions of value and who the subsidy is targeted towards (Pinnegar, Easthope et al 2009). Today, there are limited affordable housing finance schemes with two continuing examples including Keystart and HomeStart Finance in Western Australia and South Australia respectively, provided by government backed, arms-length, agencies (Pawson, Martin et al 2022;Pawson, Milligan et al 2020).…”

“…The policies are deliberately limited in their application to a small cohort in part to contain the potential impact on wider housing markets and likely cost of such a program if offered at scale (Pinnegar, Easthope et al 2009). Pawson, Martin et al (2022) provide a more comprehensive review of policies in support of home ownership in Australia as part of the wider AHURI research inquiry which this report forms part.…”

“…Government policy in support of home ownership has in recent decades become almost exclusively focussed on short term aspects of the ownership challenge, for example, providing deposit assistance and stamp duty concessions. Pawson, Martin et al (2022) recently concluded that these demand side measures have by and large only succeeded in bringing forward home purchases and have been relatively unsuccessful in allowing more households to enter home ownership. This research reaffirms this conclusion, and shows that, typically, subsidies for housing purchases only enabled participants to either bring forward their purchase decisions slightly, moving households along a housing pathway they were already on, or they enabled households to amend their decision on the type of dwelling purchased; they have tended not to make a difference when it comes to allowing households to make the transition in the first place.…”