Quote Originally Posted by stoploss View Post
I think that headline is a bit sensationalist , it is not 1 in 4 households, plenty of people rent, plenty mortgage free etc ...
Here are some more accurate figures.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck...tralia/6442650
A quarter is probably more sensationalist than it should have been as the writer should have qualified what she meant by a quarter.

From the Australian "Fact Check":

1. Home ownership rate have dropped from 70% in 1961 to 67% in 2011, which is six years ago. (I wonder what the ownership rate is in 2017.)
2. Australian prices were 3 times median household income in 1980. Now they are more than 6 times.
3. 67% of householders are owners.
4. There are 9,000,000 households in OZ. 33% of householders have home loan debt (3,000,000).
5. 75% of Australia's household debt is for housing; In 1990 47% was for housing.

The article refers to 767,000 households being under mortgage stress, which is about a quarter of the 3,000,000 households with mortgage debt. So the fact check does not contradict the article, provided the writer of the article was referring to a quarter of households with mortgage debt - although the reference to a quarter of households was not explicitly qualified.

In addition, the amount of mortgage debt and the high multiple of prices/income would make prices more susceptible, than in previous years, to either an increase in interest rates or pressure on incomes.

Interesting take-out from the Australian Fact Check is this quote about house price/income ratio: "Nationally that ratio has now passed six, or more than twice as much, and in places like Sydney it went above nine during the property boom of the early 2000s."

Auckland's ratio now surpasses ten!