Sydney home buyers have experienced a crisis in housing affordability with the average house price outstripping average incomes to a point where many people do not have access to adequate housing because of their inability to get a mortgage or even afford the rental price hikes. There have been similar experiences in many American cities and there have also been some inventive solutions to these problems. One program which looks like it is going to get a run in Sydney is a system where land is owned as community title, but home buyers own their roof. It is estimated that this scheme could cut the cost of owning a home by half. There would be a need to ‘create another rung on the property ladder’. This is what some of the community groups involved in the project are advocating.
The name of this new scheme is the Waratah Trustand it is being created in Bondi as s way of halving the cost of housing. Presuming that the land trusts can acquire new land in the first place, advocates are planning to implement a new form of social housing to Sydney as an idea to bridge the gap between renting, government housing and the private property market. The model of ownership is that the land trust owns the land and members own the dwelling, reducing the cost of ownership enormously. The investment can then be sold back to recoup the investment of the owners. This may present a partial solution to the housing affordability crisis. The model has also been tried in Victoria where land has been be quested to the trust to being the process.
This new solution to the housing affordability crisis will present a new method of attributing title which will be used to convey the ownership of land and real real property to people in Sydney. Currently, there are not types of title which currently exist that have this dynamic. There is Strata title, Torrens Title and Community Title. It is conceivable that this new type of land scheme could be arranged around strata or community title. If you are interested in buying a property under this system of title, please do not hesitate to contact us.
