{"id":186917,"date":"2024-11-30T15:30:50","date_gmt":"2024-11-30T04:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/propertyupdate.com.au\/?p=186917"},"modified":"2024-11-29T19:19:45","modified_gmt":"2024-11-29T08:19:45","slug":"the-senate-has-passed-the-help-to-buy-housing-scheme-it-will-help-but-not-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/propertyupdate.com.au\/the-senate-has-passed-the-help-to-buy-housing-scheme-it-will-help-but-not-much\/","title":{"rendered":"The Senate has passed the Help to Buy housing scheme. It will help, but not much"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Having finally stared down Greens resistance in the final sitting week of the year, the Albanese government looks set to tick off the last of its 2022 housing commitments in need of parliamentary approval.<\/p>\n

Like most of Labor\u2019s other housing measures, the Help to Buy and Build to Rent tax reform initiatives are rather narrowly targeted and quite modest in scale.<\/p>\n

But although no one is claiming them as silver bullets, both can be fairly justified as sensible efforts to address widely perceived housing pressure points: namely, home ownership affordability and private rental housing quality.<\/p>\n

\"Buying<\/p>\n

How will Help to Buy work?<\/span><\/h2>\n

True to its name, Help to Buy is a mechanism to assist low to moderate-income earners in accessing home ownership.<\/p>\n

Other first-home buyer assistance programs of course already exist.<\/p>\n

The most important is the Commonwealth\u2019s\u00a0Home Guarantee Scheme,<\/a>\u00a0which enables access to low-deposit mortgages.<\/p>\n

Created by former prime minister Scott Morrison, but expanded by his successor Anthony Albanese, this now offers such help to 50,000 households annually.<\/p>\n

This is well over a third of all first-home buyers.<\/p>\n

Importantly, though, Help to Buy is a more ambitious scheme that complements the guarantee program by targeting people on lower incomes.<\/p>\n

It does this by setting lower income eligibility limits and by offering more substantial assistance to successful applicants.<\/p>\n

That combination means Help to Buy can extend home ownership further down the income scale.<\/p>\n

So whereas the Home Guarantee Scheme is mainly about enabling people to bring forward their first home acquisition, Help to Buy potentially enables home ownership for some people who were otherwise permanently excluded.<\/p>\n

By taking a 30\u201340% stake, or \u201cequity share\u201d, in the acquired home, the government reduces both the size of the buyer\u2019s down payment and their mortgage loan.<\/p>\n