Housing Affordability in WA: A tale of two tenures

This report by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre focuses on housing affordability.

It features findings from the fourth BCEC Housing Affordability Survey of 4,000 households across Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland.

This fifteenth report in in BCEC’s Focus on WA series builds on the Centre’s earlier reports into Housing Affordability and finds that housing affordability has improved in Western Australia but this improvement has been uneven, with a significant divide between those who own their home and those who are renting. It finds that owner-occupiers are more comfortable now than they have been in some time, whereas many in the private rental market, particularly single parents, are struggling to make ends meet.

Key Findings

• Perth’s residential property price index has risen 9.6 per cent to 109.2 between December 2019 and March 2021.
• Perth now ranks third among states for annual growth in the price of established house, behind Hobart and Sydney.
• Nearly 11,000 dwellings were approved in WA between January and April 2021. This compares to under 4,800 approvals over the first four months of 2020.

Authors

Adam Crowe, Alan Duncan, Amity James, Steven Rowley.

Read the report here.