Friday on my mind: The workers avoiding the CBD
Staff incentives fail to fire with workers as NSW State Government gets a jump start on the weekend
2 min
Massages, pilates classes, free food and beverages and discounted parking have not been enough to lure office staff back to the CBD, a commercial property expert said this week.
Head of research at Ray White Commercial, Vanessa Rader said despite best efforts by employers, staff have been less inclined to come into the city on Fridays, prompting calls for the introduction of a four-day week.
“While office owners and employers are doing their bit to encourage staff interaction in the office by way of perks and experiences such as massages, pilates classes, free cannolis and iced lattes, occupancy levels remain subdued,” she said. “Now Transport NSW has weighed in, Sydney’s public transport prices are set to increase next month, weekly caps however have remained unchanged and Friday is now considered a weekend.”
Last weekend, NSW Transport announced that weekend fares will also apply on Fridays, providing all-day travel for no more than $8.90 for adults on metro, train, light rail and bus services.
“However, half-price trips after eight journeys will no longer be available when the fare change comes into effect,” the statement said. “Fewer people are travelling five days a week, resulting in lower uptake of the half- price trips benefit, which has dropped from 24 percent pre-Covid to 14 percent in 2023.”
City office vacancies are at their highest rates since the late 1990s, with Sydney and Melbourne recording 11.5 percent and 15 percent respectively. Ms Rader said there were several factors keeping occupancy rates consistently low.
“The prolonged historically low 3.7 percent unemployment rate is a stumbling block for many businesses, the lack of quality talent leading to employers having to provide greater flexibility to secure quality staff,” she said. “Hybrid working models allow remote working, be it from home, in regional areas or even interstate with limited need for “in the office” interaction continuing to be commonplace.”
However, data released by CoreLogic last month showed the desire for regional areas has cooled, with key areas such as the Richmond-Tweed, Shoalhaven and Southern Highlands in NSW and Ballarat and Geelong in Victoria experiencing falls in values between -10.4 percent and -20.4 percent, indicating a return to city areas.
In the meantime, Ms Rader said the case for a four-day week to entice workers back to the city while maintaining work-life balance is growing.
“The mandating of staff back into the workplace for a four-day week, would do much to stimulate the office market’s demand for space, while promoting better work/life balance, reduced stress and growth in health benefits,” she said. “(This would) leave the three-day weekend to explore Sydney on public transport at a discounted rate, or travelling across toll roads, growing family time and healthy lifestyle habits.”
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The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
3 min
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
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