First home buyers in Australia: a 2020 snapshot

With the post-Royal Commission finance crunch on investors, a lot of focus has shifted on to first home buyers as a significant part of the market. This focus intensified with the Liberal’s 2018 election promise to help first home buyers. This happened in the form of the First Home Buyers’ Deposit Scheme.

The First Home Buyers’ Deposit Scheme wasn’t just about housing affordability though. It was also about helping inject some positivity into the lagging Australian property market. So just how much do impact do first home buyers have on the property market?

With average home ownership hovering around 70%, home ownership is an important aspect of Australian society, so it is no surprise to find that first home buyers make up over a quarter of transactions annually!

This market is increasing significantly. The first home buyer market has actually increased 10% in NSW since 2017, and this coincided with the NSW Government’s housing affordability package introduction. Those figures could potentially increase with the First Home Buyers’ Deposit Scheme coming into effect.

Here’s some more data on this important market.

Over the last 10 years, the first home buyer market has averaged 25% of property transactions. It was 27.5% in July 2019
In 2019, that amounted to 110,00 first home buyer property sales
23% sales were for brand-new dwellings (just over 25,000 dwellings)
The median value of dwellings for first home buyers is around $500,000.

First home buyer demographics

The mean age of people buying their first home in Australia sits around 35, and increase from 33 since 1995. This means that there are still some affordability challenges for first home buyers which has been intensified since the banking credit crunch of 2017/18.