Housing News Digest
Housing News Digest
The Tenants' Union Housing News Digest compiles our pick of items from all the latest tenancy and housing media, sent once per week, on Thursdays.
Below is the Digest archive from November 2020 onwards. From time to time you will find additional items in the archive that did not make it into the weekly Digest email. Earlier archives are here, where you can also find additional digests by other organisations.
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Archive
Perrottet, Trump and their architecture of pie-eyed beauty
Elizabeth Farrelly The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)One of several things Perrottet and Trump share is a hatred of modern architecture. Why? Because, they say, it’s ugly. ... Perrottet’s anti-Modern spray last November was strictly of the “I don’t know much about architecture but I know what I like” variety, a calculated sop to populist anti-intellectualism. He picked soft targets which only the few, the knowledgeable, would defend – the Sirius, Seidler’s Blues Point Tower, White Bay power station and assorted charmless annexures to grand old buildings. ... Proudly aligning himself with the “architecturally unenlightened”, Perrottet declared: “The fact a building might photograph nicely at dusk – and thrill a coterie of architectural sophisticates with its bold articulation of the revolutionary maxims of Fifth-Wave-Neo-Post-Structuralist design theory – doesn’t count for much if it’s an eyesore.” So it’s all about beauty.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/perrottet-trump-and-their-ar…
# NSW, Heritage listings.‘Knocks me out’: Moves to cool hot property market lock out first home buyers
Clancy Yeates The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Ashley Van Deyk was finding the competition with other home buyers tough enough before this week’s news of tighter lending rules. Now the 24-year-old, who is trying to buy her first unit on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, fears she will be among those bearing the brunt of a move to put the brakes on higher-risk mortgages.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/knocks-me-ou…
# Australia, Home ownership, Housing market, Young people.Missing apostrophe in Facebook post lands NSW real estate agent in legal hot water
The Guardian (No paywall)A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/oct/10/missing-apostrophe-i…
# NSW, Landlords and agents.Rent to buy: The scheme younger Australians are using to fight high prices
Sezen Bakan The New Daily (No paywall)Younger Australians who never thought they had a chance of owning a home are getting a foot on the property ladder through rent-to-buy schemes. The industry has a chequered history, with many people in the past losing deposits when they failed to follow through with their intended purchase.
https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2021/10/10/rent-to-buy-home/
# Australia, Rent, Home ownership, Housing market.Pandora Papers reveal big foreign money secretly behind some prime Australian real estate
Echo Hui, Patrick Begley and Elise Worthington ABC (No paywall)Australian properties — including Tasmanian dairy farms, Sydney CBD apartments and even a Hilton Hotel — have been secretly purchased by wealthy, sometimes controversial foreign figures, an ABC investigation has discovered. The money came from a corrupt Chinese steel magnate, a political power couple in Sri Lanka and a former oil executive via opaque corporate structures. Each purchase involved multiple layers of offshore trusts and shell companies, making ownership almost impossible to track. Unlike other countries, Australia lacks a register to show who ultimately owns property. Watch on YouTube. (Four Corners)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-05/pandora-papers-four-corne…
# Research alert, Video Australia, Housing market, International, Landlords and agents.Lenders battle for market share amid record refinancings
John Collett The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)While lockdowns in our two biggest cities saw the value of new home lending decline in August, the total amount of refinancings to new lenders surged 3.1 per cent. ... The biggest factors driving the refinancings are the two cuts in official interest rates by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) last year, the second of which, in November, took the cash rate to a record low of 0.1 per cent.
https://www.smh.com.au/money/borrowing/lenders-battle-for-market…
# Australia, Housing market.‘Gold Coast of the west’: Scarborough residents fighting high rises on five fronts
Hamish Hastie The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Despite the efforts of anti-high rise groups, Scarborough could become the Gold Coast of the west by the middle of the decade with six towers above 18-storeys either approved or earmarked for the famous stretch of Perth coastline. The developments include a tri-tower proposal that would feature 16, 22 and 46-storey towers; a 24-storey apartment block; a dual 12 and 29-storey complex and a dual 17 and 19-storey development.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/gold-coast-of-…
# Australia, Housing market, Planning and development.Housing stock gains $1 trillion in value even as businesses shed staff
Shane Wright The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Australia’s residential housing stock has gained $1 trillion in value in just five months, even as the number of people in work falls back to pre-coronavirus levels with lockdowns in NSW and Victoria dragging down the national jobs market.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/housing-stock-gains-1-tr…
# Australia, Housing market.