More home buyers take up government help to purchase
While more first home buyers and single parents took up Home Loan Guarantees in FY23, about 17,500 spots were left on the shelf
2 min
More home buyers are using government home loan guarantees to help them purchase a property, however, only two-thirds of the 50,000 guarantees on offer in FY23 were taken up.
More than 32,500 guarantees were issued in FY23, according to Housing Australia’s annual report on the Home Guarantee Scheme. The scheme comprises three segments – the First Home Guarantee (FHBG), the Family Home Guarantee (FHG) and the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee (RFHBG).
The schemes allows first home buyers to purchase with a mere 5% deposit, and single parents need just 2%. This is vastly lower than the standard 20% deposit required by most lending institutions. In FY23, just under 70% of FHBG guarantees were taken up, along with just 60% of RFHGB guarantees and only 36% of FHG guarantees. The remaining guarantees expired.
Those using the scheme represented one in three of all first home buyers across Australia in FY23, up from one in seven in FY22. According to the report: “The dramatic change is likely due to a combination of the increased number of available Scheme places in 2022–23, the widened eligibility within the Scheme and first home buyers facing a more challenging purchasing environment.”
Housing Australia’s head of research, data and analytics, Hugh Hartigan said substantial increases in interest rates since May 2022 had led to more buyers relying on government help to buy a home. “The broader macroeconomic environment with rapidly rising interest rates has substantially decreased mortgage serviceability with flow-on effects for affordability and this has led to first home buyers relying more heavily (proportionally) on the scheme than in previous years,” he said.
Among the trends are an increasing number of younger Australians and essential workers seeking help. More than half of all places under the FHBG and RFHBG were taken up by first-time buyers aged under 30. That’s up from about a third in FY20, when the scheme was first introduced. About 14% of FHBG guarantees issued in FY23 went to buyers aged 18 to 24 years, up from 3% in FY20. Essential workers such as teachers, nurses and social workers took up 7,721 guarantees in FY23, up from 5,650 in FY22.
At a state and territory level, demand for guarantees remained strongest in Queensland and Western Australia in FY23. Buyers in Greater Perth, Melbourne, Greater Brisbane and regional Queensland received the largest number of guarantees in FY23.
The most popular postcodes for scheme buyers were 4740 (Mackay Harbour, QLD area), 6112 (Armadale, WA area), 4207 (Beenleigh, QLD area), 4350 (East Toowoomba, QLD area), 3064 (Craigieburn, VIC area), 4305 (Ipswich, QLD area), 6171 (Baldivis, WA area), 6164 (Hammond Park, WA area), 3029 (Truganina, VIC area) and 4680 (Gladstone, QLD area).
The scheme has been expanded for FY24 to include eligible permanent residents, non-first home buyers who have not owned a property in the past 10 years, and any two applicants such as friends, siblings, and married or de facto couples. The FHG has also been expanded to include eligible single legal guardians.
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’
