In the 70’s if you were on an average income and wanted to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars they’d think you were mad, in this day and age banks are practically begging people on average incomes to sign up to an $800,000 mortgage to buy a bog standard residential property. They all have sales targets to meet & just one product to sell: mortgages on residential property.
It’s not just the mind-set of would be property buyers that changed, it’s the mindset of the retail banks.
I doubt ‘mortgage brokers’ existed in a big way in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s either. There is this whole apparatus of what I term ‘the property industry’ that exists to tell people that eye-watering prices are actually really affordable & that they have to get in now otherwise they will miss out.
I remember the TV ads with the young lady talking about the large ‘capital growth’ to be had in a certain area, and another ad with the smiling lady saying “yeah, this is a great buy”. You don’t see these ads anymore.
Were there ads like that in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s? Not that I can remember. Real estate agencies and retail banks made untold billions billions out of the property frenzy, and plowed a portion of their winnings back into advertising that told people that property was the risk-free bet you couldn’t lose.