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The phone calls started the morning after the budget. You know the ones. "Should I sell before the negative gearing changes come in?" "Is this the end of the investor market?" "My accountant sent me a newsletter and now I can't sleep."
So let's talk about it. Not as economists, because we aren't economists, but as the people who have spent years sitting at kitchen benches in your homes, watching what actually happens when the rules change.
We have seen this movie before
Cast your mind back to 2019. Negative gearing reform was front page news for months. Owners rang us in a flap. A few sold in a hurry, convinced the sky was about to fall.
The sky did not fall. The owners who held their well located apartments through that entire news cycle did very nicely. The ones who sold in a panic mostly spent the next few years trying to buy back into a market that had moved without them.
We're not saying this round of changes is identical, or that it won't matter at all. Tax settings are real and your accountant's newsletter is allowed to exist. What we're saying is that in our corner of the market, the apartments themselves have always cared a lot less about Canberra than the headlines do.
What the budget cannot change
Here's the thing no tax policy has ever altered. People want to live in New Farm. They want to walk to James Street for coffee, along the river to the Powerhouse, complain affectionately about the parking. They wanted that before negative gearing existed in its current form and they will want it long after this budget is a pub trivia question.
Demand for a beautiful apartment in a beautiful street is not a line item. It's a feeling, and feelings are stubbornly resistant to legislation.
The fundamentals we bang on about have not moved an inch. Light. Layout. A building that's loved and well run. A position you'd actually want to live in yourself. An apartment with those things had a queue at its open home in June, and it will have a queue in November, whatever the tax treatment.
What we'd actually do
If you own an apartment in our patch, our advice is annoyingly boring. Don't make a thirty year decision based on a three year political cycle. Policy is weather. Your home is climate.
If you were already thinking of selling for your own reasons, the reasons that actually matter, like life, family, the next chapter, then the conversation is worth having now, calmly, with real numbers. If you were happy holding last month, one budget night shouldn't change that.
Love ya :-)
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