I’m a baby-boomer myself, but I reckon the planet’s going to make it through OK if Gen Y’s excellent response to the homebuyers’ strike is any indication.
Comments on “GetUp”‘s site, at Prosper Australia , and on Facebook shows Gen Y has the ability to navigate itself safely through all the hype, dross and lies fed to them about the residential property market by mainstream media. Taking on incredibly excessive debt for 30 years doesn’t appeal to them.
In what way is it a real “market”, by the way? Can the fruit and veggie market keep produce off the market until we are starving and have to pay blackmail prices? No, the fruit and tomatoes would rot. Can manufacturers hold cars, computer equipment, etc., off the market? Wouldn’t they become obsolete and rust?
But what happens with real estate ……? Yes, that’s right!
Using the novel approach of researching those properties having no water usage, EarthSharing‘s Andrew Sadauskas found one in every 15 properties in his Melbourne study area were vacant, held off the market without a tenant, the owners apparently pinning their trust in making a capital gain rather than running the risk of a tenant damaging their properties (for a 3% return, or less).
Sadauskas’ 2009 report I Want to Live Here concludes “The most astounding results, however, came from the 11.05% vacancy rate in Carlton, the 16.56% Genuine Vacancy Rate in West Melbourne, and the 28.96% Genuine Vacancy Rate in Carlton South”. [!]
As an article in The Herald Sun today continued to give all the wrong reasons for “the supersonic property boom that has us reeling”, I just had to leave the following comment:-
Apparently Planning Minister Matthew Guy sees no connection between these fantasyland house prices and the winding back of rates and land taxes over the last 40 years, or the fact that the Income Tax Assessment Act slaughters salary earners and promotes property speculation with negative gearing? No, it’s just supply and demand. [Sigh!] They don’t improve, do they?
Keep on challenging all the real estate institutions’ crud, people! They’re not working for you!
Of course we aren’t buying your overpriced Aussie houses. What 20-something would willingly go deep into debt to acquire a poorly built, expensive, life restricting pile of bricks that we’ll only acquire later on for much less when you need to cash out so you can pay someone else (probably one of us) to wipe your ass?
That’s the price you pay for locking us out of the market and HOARDING instead of investing. Supply and demand keep prices high you say? Too right. All we need to do is play the waiting game, the free market will correct this imbalance as we have longer to wait than you. Tick tock… you’ll be desperate to sell in 10 or 20, and that’s when you get a dismal offer from us. You can look at what you think your house is worth all you want, but til’ the money is in your account – it doesn’t mean anything.
And another thing… An Adaptation of Fredrich Nietzsche ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’- to ‘poem’ of the current housing / land abominations.
Poem-: All you real-estate men are laughable to me, you men of the present! And especially when you stand around at auctions amazed at yourselves, but to be silent about your distortion of classical economics is worse, than living with it, as silence grows like cancer, all suppressed economic history’s as you have tried to do to the mob eventually become poisonous, and bubble over. As for your weekends, you have merely written over real estate signs of the past with new signs signs over daubed with new gentrified ones: thus you speculators have hidden your free lunch well, by saying it’s a good or service, but your service is a mockery, And so let everything that can break upon our truths about your perpetual war with the real economy of labour for the privileges of fictitious finance capital- while capital gains, labour looses-break! There is still many a house still to be built. Don’t be Jealous, lovers of Georgist economic truths because of these inflexible neo-liberal oppressive men who make caged and foul hateful birds of their buyers, Truth has never clung to the arm of the inflexible man wilfully unable to see his folly, and crimes against the economy, As for your housing and land ponzi bubble, shaly your Neoliberal God has handed, you Baby Boomers a free lunch that will make you puke! Having eyes for nothing but gain, how is it you expect to digest your free-lunch as you devour others, but cannot even digest yourselves, truly you are a spectacle of disgust and opulent rebellion of defiance in devouring all generations before and after you came! You lament your ship is sinking while your children are drowning overboard, having confiscated all the life boats for yourselves you baby Boomers, you have now taken hostage, the present, the past, and the future, but if you want to avoid sinking completely all you have to do is share that which you stole in the first place, to make your ship lighter, but you will not and cannot, for Pride and arrogance has overcome you.
I found these presumptions in ‘the wording’ in my web browser on theage.com.au website-: ‘we thought you might be interested in Victoria news. Not your state? My response was me think it’s not really my state is it? when I am locked out of land ownership regardless of being born in Victoria!