Goodies

The real estate industry likes to get its Christmas list in early. Back in January the REIA had its pre-budget submission ready to go, which I had a bit of a glance at, chuckled and thought I'd revisit it when there as a little more currency in the story. With rumblings of a tough budget seeping out, in an effort to soften up those downtrodden minorities - families on over $150k with kids in daycare, the REIA shouldn't get its hopes up any of their lunatic suggestions will be adopted. In saying that they shouldn't be too worried that any of their sacred cows will be slaughtered either.   

As you'd imagine, the REIA submission is basically a bunch of real estate agents not washing for a couple of days, putting on their rattiest clothes, smearing some dirt on their face and panhandling for tax dollars. While they'll dress up the benevolence of their requests - usually in the well worn pair of pants known as 'affordability', most sane people have now noticed the arse is out that pair of pants and sometimes the industry can't even deny the true motive. In the midst of the buyers' boost hysteria, I was listening to Scott Pape on ABC Nightlife. Pape was slating the doubling for all it was worth when the head of the REIA rang in for a whinge. He defended the measures the government used as they helped first home buyers, yet also let it slip that the grant was good for the protection of the industry and its 70 odd thousand employees.

On Friday the REIA put out a press release reminder of its amazing ideas again, which achieved little attention, except now from this odious blog. To sum up the submission, most of it was "don't tax the family home", "keep negative gearing/don't increase capital gains tax on investment properties", "get rid of stamp duty". There was some sort of dribble about first home owners being able to access their voluntary superannuation contributions, but in a country where people still pay scant regard to their superannuation - except to whinge when the gains are sub-par in the bog standard option/failure fund they've never bothered to change - which first home buyers would really be contributing anything voluntarily to their superannuation? 

Now I know you're thinking, "surely he hasn't dragged us through three paragraphs of waffle without some sort of happy ending/reveal of real estate craziness we were expecting?"

It's hard to imagine an idea more stupid than this. But first, after using the justification, "first home buyers are at their lowest levels since Jesus lit his first doobie," they conveniently ignore how many first home buyers they borrowed from the future to keep their ponzi going last time. Basically, forget that we skewed the date out of the market and give us more money to do it again, oh and this is about affordability if we hadn't already said that ten times already in guilt ridden, smoke screen fashion. 

What's even more fantastic is the indexation, now I'm sure there's better people than me to truly analyse what kind of a meth hit this would be to the market in the short term, but I can take a stab in the dark. It cranks the market for at least a few years - first home buyers have more cash, vendors see them coming, market gets pushed up, the grant is then increased with the fuel of buying frenzy and then first home buyers have more cash, vendors see them coming, market gets pushed up, the grant is increased...

Libido way up, judgement impaired and houses are humped. There's no telling how long the high would be, but when the thing begins to splutter, and it would, eventually the numbers of first home buyers would be totally eviscerated from the market and what happens then? AFFORDABILITY! Is screamed from the roof tops and the self serving whinge begins about first home buyers being priced out.

"Please government, can we have some more?"

For long enough, the real estate industry and its parasitic offshoots, aided by the government, have played a family of rogue beavers - building dams upstream and stopping the flow of money to anything worthwhile or productive. It's time someone planted a few depth charges on those dams and let the money flow to a better place.

If the REIA truly wants to help its membership, it should offer advice for the coming decade - giving agents options on how to cut some of the fat. You can get by without the spray tan and teeth whitening and you'll still look ok if you roll up to show a house in a '99 Mitsubishi Mirage. Rivers' discount stores will sometimes have shirts on sale for 6 bucks. For the older gents, you don't have to go in for the salon cut and colour, buy a box of Dark and Natural and remove the greys in your own bathroom sink.

And if your pubes are showing a dash of silver - shave 'em, don't whine to the government about it.