RORY SALAZAR | Finance | Contact
As a seasoned and highly successful property investor, I know firsthand that logic occasionally tries to creep its way into the property market of Australia.
Thankfully, our property market, more so than any other around the globe, is irrepressibly resilient against any form of logic or reason, belligerently so.
And this is especially true nowadays during our country’s ill-advised push towards ‘affordable housing’, whatever that means. But as an astute property investor who can sound convincing even without ever really understanding what they’re talking about, our property market’s resilience-despite-everything approach to just keeping the profits coming proves that we must continue to avoid the mistake of making
housing affordable.
Because that would be a genuine housing price crisis. If housing is affordable, what does that mean for our capital gains? If housing is affordable, what happens to all us investors who have continually pushed prices higher and bought multiple properties at top dollar, with the steadfast knowledge that the price will always be more expensive tomorrow? Death and despair, is what affordable housing means.
If prices go down, housing becomes affordable. Is that what us property investors really want? Is that what future home buyers really want?
A declining asset? A capital loss? An abject failure on the biggest investment decision of your life? What a crisis that would be for all Australians that matter. The ones that own property.
Like, who even benefits from affordable housing? I can’t think of any one, and I’m an astute property investor who knows how the property market works.
Our strong house prices are what drives people to take out colossal loans, work two jobs, and eat instant noodles for a decade just to secure a dilapidated two-bedroom apartment. If housing were affordable, this simply would not happen, and that’s a shame.
Is an affordable home even an asset? No, it’s just a home. How sad that thought is.
House prices have avoided crisis for so long, that they are now a proud tradition Australians hold dear. And it’s traditions like these that need to be respected. You need to respect keeping housing inaccessibly unaffordable. It’s what separates us from those countries with the governments that actually take concrete action and deliver meaningful affordable housing policies.
Heaven forbid it ever happens here.
