Anthony Landahl

We'll come back to that later.

But essentially, the change proposed is currently, if you own an investment property for more than 12 months, you only pay 50% of the capital gain upon the sale of the property.

The proposed change is to halve that capital gains discount from 50% to 25% in simple terms.

Yeah, absolutely.

And there's a lot of talk around the potential impacts of this policy and potential unforeseen consequences.

First thing I should say, it is likely that existing investor properties will be grandfathered.

So the concession won't change for existing investors, of which there's 2.3 million mums and dad investors in Australia.

It'll go forward with new investment properties.

I think the main conversations around what impact will it have on new investors firstly coming into the market?

Will it decrease the number of investors coming into the market where they shift their asset allocation to say shares?

Secondly, will investor strategy change?

Will investors, rather than try and build a portfolio and turnover stock, will they hold stock for longer?

Potential impacts of that are less stock on the market if you've got less investors or less turnover.

Less stock on the market potentially means an increase in rent for those people seeking to rent.

The other thing that might happen in maybe a less clear way is potentially investors increasing rents to pass on the cost because they'll be doing their cash flow analysis.

They'll be looking at the overall picture of their investment portfolio and whether they increase the rents.

We're trying to get a higher yield on the way through knowing that the actual capital gain at the end is less.

And the last point I'd make is it doesn't solve the main issue with Australian housing, which is this issue of supply.

All this does is move the deck chairs around and potentially disincentivise mum and dad investors getting into the market and providing stock for renters.

It does not resolve our chronic undersupply issue in the housing market.