Housing affordability on the rise.

The March Quarter edition of the Adelaide Bank/REIA Housing Affordability Report shows improvements in housing affordability in all states and territories when compared to the same quarter in 2013.

Commenting on the report’s findings, Damian Percy, General Manager of Adelaide Bank said: “The proportion of family income needed to meet home loan repayments has fallen from 30.8% to 30.6%. On the rental side, the proportion of family income needed to meet rent payments has increased slightly from 25.4% in the December quarter to 25.7% .

“The latest findings represent a 5% gap between rental payments and home loan repayments. We welcome an improvement in this quarter, but what of the future? 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. How can we make it easier for people to more readily upsize and downsize without having to agonise about and plan for such a move over years instead of months?

“Encouraging home ownership should be a key priority for any home lender and Adelaide Bank is committed to working with REIA 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 through Australia’s growing network of mortgage brokers” concluded Mr Percy.

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