‘Highly aspirational': How much it costs to buy a top-end property
'Maybe these numbers are a bit of a reality check – to get into the top 5 per cent of the marketplace it might be a lower benchmark than they had in their minds … For most people, that's still highly aspirational.'
Home owners at this level would likely have a substantial deposit, and were unlikely to be first home owners.
'They've got an occupation where they make very good income or they're lucky enough to have a significant history of capital in their family that might be being passed down generationally.'
Lawless said that in locations where the upper end was triple the median, there was more diversity of homes available.
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'The larger the difference between the median and the 95th percentile, then clearly the bigger the array of pricing is in the marketplace. There's a lot more diversity in the price distribution of properties, and it probably also speaks to the diversity of quality in the housing stock.'
The Demographics Group co-founder Simon Kuestenmacher said more and more people could not dream of affording even a median-priced house.
'We run a country that for the last 60 years, 70 years artificially created a scarcity of land. Since the 1950s, we grew our population by leaps and bounds,' he said.
'The Gold Coast is the only new city we created … This is a designed housing shortage.'
The rise in house prices over time in affluent neighbourhoods to multimillion-dollar levels was pushing out younger families.
'What we see quite often is that parents would have moved to what is now a middle suburb when they were quite young, houses were affordable back then, houses went up in price,' he said.
Now, their children cannot always stay in the area.
'The choice is then that you probably don't live there any more, it's just that simple,' he said.
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'They want to replicate their own childhood for their family, and that's not possible.'
But for the parents, he said the increase in their housing wealth was not useful unless they sold, often at the end of their life. Although some Australians downsized, many wanted to age in place and could not find smaller homes or apartments in their area after spending years opposing development, he said.
Barrenjoey head of economic forecasts, Johnathan McMenamin, said the harbour views in Sydney in particular had pushed up house prices for homes around the water, while the city also had a larger finance industry with high-paying jobs.
He thought zoning changes in high-value areas could create a pathway to creating more housing at a less expensive entry point, and tax changes could encourage some owners of family homes to downsize and free up housing stock.
'If state governments shifted their tax base away from transfer duty and more towards land tax, that would encourage greater turnover and downsizing and upsizing from buyers, depending on where they are in their life and how many kids they have at home,' he said.
'That could go some way to improving the market functions in those upper ends of the property market.'
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