Can’t afford a house? There’s another way to get into the property market

March 22, 2026 — 5:14am

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With another interest rate rise coming our way, the spiky topic of Australia’s property market has been on my mind a lot this week, especially how to get your foot in the door when home ownership might not be in your immediate future.

For those with mortgages, the Reserve Bank’s announcement on Tuesday that it would lift rates by 0.25 of a percentage point was an unwelcome one. On an average mortgage of $600,000, that rise will translate to about $100 extra a month.

That might not sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but when petrol prices are jumping, health insurance premiums are about to go up and other cost-of-living pressures remain, well … you know the rest.

But what if you’re among the one-third of Australians who don’t own a home? As tempting as it might be to assume the news has no impact, I can tell you from years of experience that people who aren’t yet on the property ladder spend just as much time – if not more – thinking about it.

There’s already a mountain of evidence to show that it’s so much harder for working-age Australians to buy a house today than it was 50 years ago. Back in 1976, properties in Melbourne and Sydney cost about three or four times an annual salary.

Today, that’s ballooned out to about 13 times. For wage growth to have kept up with property prices, the average salary today would have to be $190,000.

REITs won’t give you the keys to your own front door, but it is a different way of getting into the property market.

What’s interesting to me is that even though so much has changed since then, our relationship to........

© The Sydney Morning Herald