PHOTO: For most first-home buyers it’s not house prices and interest rates that matter as much as the deposit needed to get in the door.
How many years would it take you to save a deposit for a house if you didn’t have to buy anything else?
A Reserve Bank analysis has developed a new measure that uses the answer to that question to gauge the affordability – or otherwise – of the country’s houses
Karam Shaar, of Victoria University, wrote a report for the bank that considered deposit affordability.
While there is no shortage of measures of housing affordability that compare incomes to house prices, or to the cost of servicing a mortgage, it is the deposit hurdle that gets in the way of most young buyers.
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