Changes to state and federal property taxes could free up under-used housing and ease rents at a time when vacancy rates are still close to record lows.
Home-sharing, increasingly forced by soaring rents, was a trend the country needed to ease the stock shortages, outgoing Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe said at the end of May.
“If the federal government were to consider at least a three-year moratorium on the rental earned, the capital gains tax-free status and the impact on pensions, such arrangements could conceivably usher in potentially millions of bedrooms to soften the accommodation urgency,” said Scott Keck, the chairman of consultancy Charter Keck Cramer.
More than one-quarter of the country’s 9.8 million private households comprised just one person and if even half of those households made a room available at affordable rental prices, it could offer housing to hundreds of thousands of people currently priced out of the market, said Steve Bevington, the managing director of Community Housing Limited.
“We’ve got 640,000 households who need social housing and it’s not an option for all of them just to live in spare rooms.”Current single-person asset test thresholds specify $301,750 for a full pension and $656,500 for a part-pension.