Chapter 1: Can you really buy a home in NSW for under $40,000?
It's The Real Estate Podcast, brought to you by Ray White, the largest real estate and property group in Australasia. And welcome to another episode of The Real Estate Podcast, available on iHeartRadio, also on Google and Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Looking at the main centre forecast for Saturday, March the 19th already. April is going to be here before we know it.
And Sydney expecting a high today of 24 degrees and showers easing. Melbourne mostly sunny with 29 degrees. Brisbane expecting a cloudy day with 28 and in Perth today. expecting a high of 31 degrees and partly cloudy. Well, there's going to be such a talking point over the next 12 months around mortgages as the cash rate looks to increase.
First home borrowers are definitely in unfamiliar territory.
Chapter 2: What is the shared equity scheme and how does it work?
They have borrowed heavily to get into the property market. And next week we're going to be looking at fixed rates and the variable rates and look at what's happening right now between them and what is likely to occur later this year.
And we'll also be looking at borrowers refinancing because I've never really understood why a lot of people don't look for a better deal when it's available and stay with the status quo. How active should people be in this space to looking for better long-term mortgage deals? That's a question that we're going to dive into.
And also next week, we're going to be looking at home ownership and more importantly, a national shared equity scheme, which would help even the playing field for first home buyers and steady the decline in home ownership among poorer Australians of all ages. We'll be talking with Brendan Coates again, who is the Economic Policy Programme Director at Grattan Institute.
So what this scheme would do is it reduces the size of the loan you need to take out if you're in that situation to buy a home. Because say you might have
Chapter 3: How can first home buyers navigate the current mortgage landscape?
$200,000 in savings or $150,000 or whatnot, and you want to buy, say, a home for $500,000 or $600,000, you'd normally have to take out a loan for the remaining $450,000 and you won't be in the workforce long enough for a bank to give you that loan and confident you're going to pay it off when you retire in, say, 15 years' time.
But instead, you have to take out a much smaller loan because the government owns 30% of the property. So you're up for a smaller loan and you can be more confident you can pay that loan off by the time you retire. Now, in that situation, you probably never buy out the government stake.
The government remains a silent partner in that home until basically you either go into a nursing home, into aged care, or frankly that you pass away. And what that does is it reduces the risk that older Australians in particular are going to face poverty in retirement as renters.
Because we know that if you rent in retirement, you are much, much more likely to experience poverty because you're still paying rent. And if you're not having to pay rent, you're much less likely to be in poverty. And there's this looming crisis coming to retirement incomes in Australia where there are a growing number of older Australians who don't own. And we need to do something about that.
Chapter 4: What are the benefits of refinancing your mortgage?
And the shared equity scheme would help solve that problem. And a good news story of sorts, a question, can you buy a property with a three bedroom house on a 642 square metre block in New South Wales for under $40,000? That's right, under $40,000. Well, it turns out that you can. The listing is described as follows. This property needs some serious work.
It is situated at 154 Gaffney Lane in Broken Hill. It goes on to say it's a fixer-upper. or it's a knocker over and start again. It's currently listed as the cheapest house in New South Wales on realestate.com.au and it's available to buy for $39,950.
Chapter 5: How does Broken Hill compare to other Australian property markets?
The home features a lounge, kitchen, dining and bathroom area with a store shed and single car garage. But wait, there is more. There are vacant blocks of land in Broken Hill for $40,000 or less, with the cheapest being $25,000 for a 680-square-metre block of residential land. And located 1,000 k's west of Sydney,
Broken Hill has a median house price as of March 2022 of $155,000, a slight increase compared to February of 2021 where prices sat around $120,000. So that's a little bit cheaper than Sydney, where median house prices are sitting around $1.4 million. And the Gold Coast, move over the Sunshine Coast. We are going to be talking about Labrador on the Gold Coast next week.
Labrador is just north of Surfers Paradise, about five kilometres north. So when you go over the Sundial Bridge, you come into Southport and then a couple of kilometres north is Labrador.
Chapter 6: What should potential buyers consider when looking at fixer-uppers?
Labrador has what we call the golden mile of apartments on the broad water. So these are normally apartments that are between 20 and 35 stories and beautiful views out to the broad water. Parklands, it's just a way of life out there. It's amazing. Labrador is a growing suburb. We saw some growth in Southport over the last couple of years, but Labrador now is starting to take off.
So we're seeing some end-of-life homes. People are knocking the house down, renovating, making their forever home. The apartment prices are growing, as we've spoken about, but even house prices now, I mean, the entry level into Labrador now is about $750 for something that might be a fibro home on the $650 block. We connect you to the best real estate information across Australia.
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