Australia Post delivery driver says Sydney house prices are out of reach

A hardworking postie, who says he’s flat out working overtime to pay the rent, says the dream of buying a family home is unachievable.

Forty years ago, Chris Meurant would have been right to think buying his dream family home on the outskirts of Sydney was a reasonable, achievable goal.

Now, the hardworking post delivery driver says he has to “kill myself” working overtime hours just to pay the rent – with no home or plot of land in Greater Sydney within reach on his postie wage.

“Rent is half of my base wage a week,” says Mr Meurant, who is the sole breadwinner of his family which includes his partner and two sons under the age of five.

Chris and Merna Meurant with their children Noah, 4, and 7-month-old Sam at their Glen Alpine rental home. Picture: Jonathan Ng

The family recently moved in with Mr Meurant’s brother-in-law near Campbelltown in a bid to make his wage stretch just a little further.

And while the southwest Sydney local wants to keep his family in the place they’ve grown up, he said even the cheapest blocks in the Macarthur Region were out of touch for him.

“We had a look at blocks of land and it just wasn’t realistic,” he said.

“We’re getting more and more priced out. We’re getting shoved further and further away trying to find something we can afford.”

The statistics back up the affordability issue posing a headache for workers trying to find a home in Sydney.

In 1980, an average three bedroom home in Campbelltown cost $40,000, according to figures released by the NSW Valuer General at the time.

The average wage for a single male in the same year was around $13,500 – meaning buying a home was within reach at just over three-times a single man’s annual income.

The average price now for a three-bedroom house in the region is $612,000, while the average salary for an Aussie worker has grown to just $63,085, according to the latest data from the Australian Tax Office.

Meanwhile, the average house price in Sydney now sits at an eye-watering $1.186 million – or more than 18 times the average salary of an Aussie worker.

And far from a single-income family being a thing of the past, the number of households relying on a single breadwinner is expected to grow – from 25 per cent now to 29 per cent by 2061, according to the state government’s own Intergenerational Report, released earlier this month.

With no respite in housing prices, Mr Meurant said owning a home would be “impossible”.

“It’s even worse if my wife works – we’d be spending her whole wage on childcare,” he said.

‘IMPOSSIBLE’ FOR YOUNG COUPLE TO BUY IN SYDNEY

A young couple driven to tears of frustration over Sydney’s “unfair” property market say buying an investment property six hours away is a more realistic way of getting on the housing ladder, instead of buying their own home to live in.

Holly Mulley, 24, and her partner Alexander McDonald, 25 live in Ambervale in Sydney’s southwest where they’re currently raising their 14-month-old son.

Holly Mulley and partner Alex McDonald say they can’t afford to buy a home in Sydney. Pictured with their 14-month-old son Hunter McDonald at their rental home in Ambarvale. Picture: Jonathan Ng

“We’ve done our research into buying, and if we based it on our current circumstances – even if I went back to work – it’s just impossible for us to buy in Sydney,” she told The Telegraph.

“It’s devastates us … we’re looking at land and houses and it just makes me upset, it’s brought me to tears a few times.”

“Owning a home is the second most important thing to me behind my child.”

They’re one of the many Sydney residents locked out of the ultra-tight housing market, with a new report by peak body the Urban Development Institute of Australia saying sluggish rezoning could see a shortfall of 25,600 newly-built homes by 2030 in Greater Sydney, Illawarra and Hunter ‘mega-region’.

The couple have done more than their fair share to crack the city’s brutish housing market – moving to the tiny town of Narrandera, six hours to the city’s west, in a bid to save for a home several years ago.

The birth of their son led to them moving back to Ambervale, but they now plan on buying an investment property in Narrendera as their only means of getting on the property ladder.

It comes as the UDIA called for the NSW Government to “more than halve” the time taken for rezonings if it is any chance of addressing a “crisis” of undersupply.

Cutting rezoning times was key to pumping up home supply, UDIA’s NSW chief Steven Mann said.

“You need decisions now, and you only get results down the track,” he said.

“The pipeline has to be robust, has to be deep, need to be able to pivot in demands”

“It’s too slow, there’s too many roadblocks in the way, and once it’s rezoned, you still have to go through the process of a DA and getting enabling infrastructure”

He also said fragmented development remained a “huge issue” for the building of new homes to serve Sydney’s booming population, particularly in the city’s west.

“The problem with a bunch of these rezonings … if you’ve got multiple owners and multiple small owners you’re not necessarily going to get development,” he said.

The report stated, in order to meet forecasted supply needs across South Western Sydney, rezoning needed to occur as soon as this year at projects slated for sites at Appin, Catherine Fields Lowes Creek Maryland.

Appin, one of the proposals highlighted by the UDIA, includes plans for 20,000 new homes across eight different villages – on land currently completely owned by developers Walker Corporation.

“We think there should be a focus on large landholders who can deliver,” Mr Mann said.

A spokesman for the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment said a raft of actions had been introduced to tackle the “major challenge” of delivering new housing.

This includes initiating regular reports to the Delivery and Performance Committee of Cabinet to pinpoint and remove planning roadblocks, as well as pumping funding into infrastructure.

“We’re delivering rezonings in key growth areas to increase the potential for housing supply by thousands more homes and provide a further boost to the construction industry,” the spokesman said.

The spokesman said $1.29 billion since 2012 had been put forward to help deliver infrastructure for 56 new housing projects, including pipelines, electricity, sewerage, roads, schools and open space.

He added more than $413 million in developer contributions have also been collected to help fund the cost of infrastructure in new development areas, such as $58 million for the upgrading of Edmondson Avenue at Austral.