Tasmania expands housing measures

The new measures include a rise to the maximum property price across the stamp duty concessions for first home buyers and pensioners who are downsizing. The concession provides a 50 per cent discount on property transfer duty.

Under the new reforms, the property price cap for the scheme of $500,000 has been raised to $600,000.

The $500,000 cap applied from March last year, having risen from the previous threshold of $400,000.

The government has also decided to retain its first home owner grant for buyers securing a newly built home, of $30,000 for the 2022/23 financial year.

Further, Tasmania has pledged to extend the thresholds and eligibility of its Homeshare program, which allows borrowers to share the cost of buying a home with the state government.

Home buyers under the scheme have to pay out the Director of Housing’s share (previously up to 30 per cent in the property) within 30 years.

The program has been rebranded as the Housing Market Entry Program and is now open to eligible first home buyers who are purchasing existing dwellings, rather than building new homes. Previously, they would have been unable to obtain finance under the scheme.

The Tasmanian government has now reduced the requirement for a deposit to 2 per cent of the property purchase price, from the previous 5 per cent.

The government’s equity contribution has also been raised to a maximum of $200,000, or 40 per cent for new homes or units. For established homes, the government’s equity contribution will go up to $150,000, or 30 per cent of the purchase price.

10k homes over 10 years

However, the bulk of the state’s overall new housing package has been dedicated to increasing supply of affordable homes in the state, with estimated costs exceeding $1.1 billion.

Tasmania’s recently established statutory authority, Housing Tasmania, has been tasked with building and acquiring 6,500 homes and units over the next 10 years.

The initiative will extend on the government’s existing $615 million program, which has aimed to deliver 3,500 new dwellings by 2026-27.

In total, the state has aimed to deliver 10,000 new dwellings by 2032.

The statutory authority will have the capacity to borrow and invest with a balance sheet at more than $2 billion.

The new housing package will also see Tasmania double the Residential Land Rebate, which provides rebates to developers up to $10,000 per lot to help cover the cost of power, water and sewerage infrastructure.

The government has recently doubled the tax-free threshold for land tax to $100,000. The upper tax threshold has been lifted to $500,000 and the tax rate for land valued between $100,000 to $500,000 has been lowered from 0.55 per cent to 0.45 per cent.

Other initiatives the state has said it will introduce include:

• Providing safeguards for rent-to-buy schemes to encourage their uptake
• Introducing a new apartment code to simplify medium-density apartment and town house approvals
• Making rezoning applications easier to encourage development at the edges of urban growth
• Encouraging councils to achieve more “shop top” apartments
• A review of the use of the state’s social housing portfolio

The state government has already launched a number of housing support measures in recent months, including financial support for customers left in limbo by failed builders and $10,000 grants for the construction of granny flats specifically to rent.

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