Australia's Changing, Ageing population

The Australian population is ageing. This has flow-on consequences in many areas of the economy, including a change to typical age of first home purchase.

Roughly two thirds of all Australians own their own home. This has been reasonably stable, though trending down, since home ownership increased dramatically after the second world war.

It has dropped much more precipitously among younger people though.

Why the chart, then? Well, if we roughly assume that average people get wealthier with age - seems to be a fair assumption - then we can draw a line showing the bottom third and that line is going to roughly provide us with the expected median age of first home purchase. As we can see, in the early 80s that line would be just after the 30th birthday. Today it's shifted to be on the wrong side of 35, because our population is ageing.

This doesn't explain all of the change in home ownership among the young, but it does explain some of it.