Average First Home Buyer Needs $120K Deposit
Finder’s latest figures show that only a few first home buyers plan to put down a 20% deposit.
2 min
The average deposit needed to enter the property market has reached a record $120,000 according to analysis by comparison site Finder,
Finder’s senior editor of money Sarah Megginsons was shocked when the figure reached such lofty heights.
“Many first-time buyers can’t afford the hefty deposits,” Ms Megginson said.
“Australia has recently been through a house price boom and the increased deposit requirement as a result is making it much harder to crack into the market,” she said.
“Getting on the property ladder is becoming out of reach for many with affordability deteriorating.”
According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics lending data, Finder put the average loan size for the first-home buyers at $479,610 in April — almost $33,000 higher than a year earlier and more than $40,000 higher than two years ago.
However, Ms Megginson has the latest figure at about $120,000 for a 20% deposit on the average $600,000 first-home buyer property.
While the deposit amount has reached a new peak, the price falls predicted by the likes of CBA and other major banks, should come as good news to those looking to get into the market.
Despite this, with the RBA adjusting for interest rates to fight soaring inflation, affordability remains an ongoing issue.
Higher rates will increase repayments and reduce borrowing capacities, which Ms Megginson noted means people won’t be able to borrow as much.
“The actual amount first-home buyers can borrow is going to fall, as well as the fact that repayments are going to increase,” she said.
The ABS data showed the number of new owner-occupier loans to first-home buyers fell by 4.4% in April, to be 34.3% lower than a year earlier. However, it remained 4.2% higher than pre-pandemic levels in February 2020.
The Finder survey found 75% of first-time buyers paid or are planning to pay less than a 20% deposit.
That included 14% who planned to or did pay just 5% upfront.
Only 16% of those surveyed had or planned to put down a 20% deposit, while another 9% expected to have more than 20%.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
2 min
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
