Adelaide Bank adds to housing affordability debate

Housing affordability in all states and territories saw a slight improvement over the March quarter from the same period last year.

The March quarter edition of the Adelaide Bank/REIA Housing Affordability Report shows the proportion of family income needed to meet home loan repayments has fallen from 30.8 per cent to 30.6 per cent.

However, on the rental side, the proportion of family income needed to meet rent payments has increased slightly from 25.4 per cent in the December quarter to 25.7 per cent, the report found.

“The latest findings represent a five per cent gap between rental payments and home loan repayments,” Adelaide Bank general manager Damian Percy said.

"We welcome an improvement in this quarter, but what of the future?” Mr Percy said.

“Are we making it easy for people to ‘right-size’ their homes and are state planning policies and taxes such as stamp duty limiting their ability or inclination to do so?

“I think it’s important to keep the housing affordability debate rolling.”

Mr Percy said encouraging home ownership should be a key priority for any home lender and Adelaide Bank is committed to working with the Real Estate Institute of Australia to contribute to the development of sound public policy that will help ease the supply side problems that put upward pressure on housing.

“Adelaide Bank’s continuing and widely recognised contribution to improving housing affordability is to keep the cost of lending as low as we can, while providing great service throughout Australia’s growing network of mortgage brokers,” he said.