It looks like first home buyers in NSW have given up:
FIRST-homebuyers abandoned hope of snapping up a house during 2010 – with new figures revealing applications for Government hand-outs dropped by two thirds.
Eligible buyers backed away as the Federal Government wound down its grants. After claiming $1 billion in grants in 2009, the numbers dropped Australia-wide this year.
In 2009, an average 19,000 first-homebuyers a month took advantage of the grants, while this year the figure fell as low as 7460 a month, according to ABS statistics.
Note that despite the article’s misleading headline, it’s not prices that have fallen. Investors still have plenty of equity to leverage, and plenty of discouraged would-have-been homebuyers to rent to.
UPDATE (1/1): The ABC does another of its pathetic “journalism by press release” stories, giving an entire article to the Real Estate Institute’s self-interested claims that it’s “potential rate rises” that are “scaring off” first home buyers – rather than the ridiculously inflated market.
UPDATE #2 (1/1): In its list of “winners” and “losers” in 2010, The Age includes as “losers”:
HOME OWNERS: Hit by four interest rate rises totalling one percentage point, then additionally slugged when the big four banks increased rates above and beyond the Reserve Bank’s cash rate rise in November.
Typical for The Age, the plight of the people it only just yesterday reported were no longer able to buy a home of their own doesn’t even occur to it.
Moved On 
Off-topic, but I thought you might be interested in this:
http://accidentalpirate.com.au/
Saw an ad for it at the movies and could almost hear the 100 other people in the cinema simultaneously rolling their eyes.
I hope someone shouted out “hey, if I’d pirated this movie I wouldn’t have to watch these stupid bloody ads!”
‘Pirate’, it’s a bit like ‘terrorist’, overused. To me a pirate is someone who commits theft and assault on the high seas. OK, stealing content then on-selling it is pretty shitty, very criminal, but it pales into comparison to what real pirates do. Then there’s those who download content, watch it, play it, listen to it, they don’t on sell it yet the GREEDY corporations would compare them with people who commit murder and theft on the high seas.
Not just to you, but to anyone with a dictionary.
The funny thing is that the corporations are now trying to backtrack on calling copyright infringement “piracy”, because it makes it sound pretty cool. Now they’re calling it the equally inaccurate “theft”.
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