25% think being unable to afford a house impacts success

According to the third and final chapter of NAB’s white paper 'Rethink Success: working for success in the digital age', 25 per cent of the 2,019 people sampled believed that “not being able to afford to buy a house” would impact their chances of “achieving success in [their] life”.

The white paper was commissioned by NAB to explore Australians’ views on the importance and relevance of quantitative measures of success such as wealth, status and home ownership against qualitative factors such as experience, personal fulfilment and wellbeing.

When asked to select the “issues believed to impact [their] chances of achieving success in [their] life”, a quarter of respondents said they also believed that having “too much personal debt”, such as loans and mortgages, would impact their chances of success.

Other barriers to success included the rising cost of living (55 per cent), health (46 per cent), an unstable economy (33 per cent), a slow-growing Australian economy (33 per cent), and “another GFC” (27 per cent).

The research comes following on from the news that the percentage of first home buyers in the owner-occupier market has plunged to the lowest level in a quarter of a century, with numbers decreasing by 6.7 per cent to 21,825 during the September quarter 2016. That is a decline of 5.8 per cent compared to the September quarter 2015 and the lowest figure recorded since ABS records began in June 1991.

The housing market in Australia is notoriously expensive — with all of Australia’s five major housing markets having been classed as "severely unaffordable" by a recent report, with Sydney ranked as the second least affordable in the world after Hong Kong.

Research from The 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey found that the rising cost of housing in Melbourne and Sydney is also “partly to blame” for an increase in young Australians’ pessimism about their financial and emotional wellbeing.

[Related: Australia’s housing markets ‘severely unaffordable’]