HOME OWNERSHIP RATES CONTINUE TO FALL

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released their biennial survey of household income and wealth earlier this week.  The release has a huge amount of valuable data but at least initially I thought it was pertinent to look at the dwelling tenure data.  The information is provided from 1994-95 up until the latest release (2015-16).

The tenure data is premised upon who is currently residing in the property, this is important to understand because when we look at the proportion of residents who own without a mortgage for example this doesn’t necessarily represent the total number of dwellings owned outright.  The reason being that some of those properties that are occupied by renters may be owned outright by the person who is renting that property out.

With fewer households owning their home outright, there has been an increase in the proportion of households that live in a home that they own and still carry mortgage debt.  In 2015-16, 37.1% of households had mortgage debt which has increased from 35.8% in 2013-14.  At its low point over the period highlighted on the chart, 28.1% of households had mortgage debt in 1995-96.  Since 2003-04, there has consistently been a higher proportion of households with mortgage debt than those without.

Read the full artilce here
(Source RP Data)