‘A good budget for investors’

By Sasha Karen

May 11 2018
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With the budget's guts now laid bare, property experts have had time to think about what it means for investors. As it turns out that, for the most part, it is a good one.

After last year’s budget that saw investors reeling with the loss of asset claiming and travel expenses, they were able to catch a breath with this year’s budget.

However, this is because there were no measures that directly targeted property investors at all.

Tyron Hyde, director of of Washington Brown, said to Nest Egg's sister site, Smart Property Investment, that the cliché of “no news is good news” rings particularly true here.

“There was hardly anything... except for the infrastructure spending is good,” Mr Hyde said.

Mr Hyde said that companies that perform office fit outs saw a boon with the extension of the $20,000 instant write-off to June 2019.

“Other than that, there wasn't anything really addressing housing affordability, I think it was all in last year's budget; [it] was a big property play and as we predicted yesterday, there wasn't anything really touching property,” he said.

Simon Pressley, managing director of Propertyology, said that while there were not any specific funding given or taken away from investors, it was still positive.

“I do think it's a good budget for property investors, because in a broad sense, the budget has potential to increase consumer confidence and business confidence, and that's something that … since the onset of the GFC in 2008, Australia and most parts of the world have lacked,” Mr Pressley said to Smart Property Investment.

“It's more of a psychological win than anything else.”

The infrastructure spending is, as covered previously, something that — while it may not directly impact investors — should still be considered and can funnel back into their respective areas’ economies.

“How's it affect you and I as a property investor? It doesn't in a direct location sense, they're transport related projects and they're not really public transport. They're really more the movement of freight.

“What that does is when you improve the efficiency of moving goods around the country, that improves productivity, which creates more jobs, which increases corporate profits, and … when they've got confidence in their business, they can then recruit more people, create more jobs or increase salaries.

“There's an indirect knock-on effect for the whole Australian broader economy.”

For Peter Koulizos, chairman of the Property Investment Professionals of Australia, the infrastructure spend can be an asset for investors to identify where future hotspots may be.

“If investors can find out where the infrastructure is going to be built, and in particular let's say new train stations in Sydney and Melbourne, because it's the larger metropolises where public transport is more important than, say, the smaller capital cities like Adelaide and Hobart, then if you can buy within walking distance of that new train station, and technically walking distance is 400 metres or five minutes, then you could do quite well,” he said to Smart Property Investment.

Another piece of the budget that Mr Pressley was pleased with was the personal tax cut, which he saw as “another psychological win”.

“It’s been described as $10 a week or an extra hamburger a week; let's not dress it up any more for what it is, it's not a lot but the fact is that it's going in that direction,” he said.

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