Sydney, Australia, is officially the second most expensive place to buy a home on the freakin' planet.
We can only assume this is welcome news to young Aussies and first home buyers, who are probably already fed up as the city suffers through the grips of a rental crisis.
But that doesn't mean people who live in other cities Down Under should get busy pouring themselves a piping hot bath of full schadenfreude, because it turns out no Australian metropolis has fared all that well.
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According to a the Demographia International Housing Affordability Scheme 2023 report, all five of Australia's major property markets - so that's Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth - have been 'severely unaffordable' for homebuyers since the turn of the millennium.
Maybe just cancelling getting coffees and Netflix subscriptions aren't the key to homeownership after all.
Who knew?
Well, everyone except the already rich and Baby Boomers, apparently.
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Anyway, Melbourne came in second for the Australian cities, taking out the number nine slot on the 'most expensive places to buy a home in the world' list.
Next came Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth.
The report went through the median house prices in each city and, using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, tallied that up against inflation.
Spoiler alert: It ain't good news,
"Adelaide median house prices have increased 6.1 times the rate of inflation since 2020, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI)," the report reads.
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"Sydney prices increased 6.0 times the CPI, Brisbane 5.2 times, Melbourne 4.9 times and Perth 4.2 times.
"In each of these five housing markets, the house price inflation since 2000 exceeded that of all of the product groups constituting the CPI (such as food, clothing, transportation and education and health)."
Our trans-Tasman neighbours in New Zealand earned a spot in the global top 10, with Auckland claiming the seventh spot on the big, bad, naughty housing list.
Hong Kong came in at number one, while Vancouver was third, Honolulu was fourth, San Jose was fifth, Los Angeles is sixth, San Francisco was eighth and Toronto rounded it out for tenth.
.webp)
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So if you can't buy and you can't rent, what do you do?
We don't have an answer for that one, but some people are getting a tad creative with housing in an attempt to profit off the housing crisis in the New South Wales capital.
One guy in Sydney chucked some tarps over the windows of his enclosed balcony and called it a room, chucking it up for rent in a CBD high-rise apartment.
So, yeah. There's that.
P.S: Help. Things are getting grim out here.
Rachel Lang