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Date Published : Friday, February 08, 2008
Rising interest rates and rapidly increasing house prices are not putting people off from taking out home loans and moving house, new federal government figures have revealed.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the number of established dwellings financed each year has almost doubled from 348,000 in between 1994 and 1995 to 681,000 in 2006-07.
As a result, the average home loan for the first-time buyer has rapidly increased, from around $90,000 in 1994 to $230,000 last year.
Revealed in the ABS 2008 Year Book, the research also shows the average home loan size for people who refinanced their debt was around $5,000 less than that of a first-time buyer.
The ABS said: "The decline in outright home ownership may reflect increasing uptake of flexible low-cost financing options which allow households to extend their existing home mortgages for purposes other than the original home loan purchase."
Due to the increases in house prices, many more Australians than ever before are currently renting homes. Private rents in Sydney were 74 per cent higher than those in Hobart during the middle of 2007.
Almost a quarter of all the people who live in Sydney are renting properties, the ABS figures show.
The average cost of a home in Sydney reached $500,000 during 2006, nearly double the average $262,000 of a property in Hobart.
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