Was the 70's house prices more affordable than today

I recall paying a whopping $88,000 in the very early 1980’s for our first home investment property in the upper north shore of Sydney. House price average was around the $29,000 mark then. Today Sydney’s average house price has escalated to $844,000 and Melbourne average house price of around $19,800 in the 70’s has risen to $615,000 today.

But before you go all goggly eyes and say What! spare a moment and compare real for real.

In the 1970’s the average wage was around the $5100 mark. I recall my first job working for an Architect only paid around $110 a week, rent was then about $30 a week ( and what a view the old flat had over Mosman bay).

In the 1970’s strange as it may sound, but wives were not as actively engaged in full time employment as they are now. It was a one income household- the sole breadwinner

Today the average wage is around the $1200 a week (ABS states around the $1400 a week before tax) so if one was to pay off their mortgage on a Sydney home today it would take about 13.5 years to pay off your mortgage if all the salary of one partner was devoted to the mortgage while the other partner’s wages paid for the living expenses.

In the 1970’s it would take 5.8 years to pay off their off loan on the house when the average Sydney house price was hovering around the $27,000 mark and most households were single income

Was life better better in the 1970’s when a family was content with one car, one TV, one income and not many overseas holidays compared to our lifestyle today. I have seen both and might not agree.

I still recall the first home becoming a dual occupancy development at a time dual occ was a novel and new idea. And even then the Council Planner put up a huge fight and more so because the neighbours (and most Sydney siders on the north shore) were totally against seeing the quarter acre block being divvied up fearing thy would lose all their privacy. The dual occ site was valued around $175 K- more than double what I had paid for the whole block and the original house with some internal renos sold for the $450 K mark a few years after I bought the site. Yes it was a superb result but it came back to timing, finding the right site and getting a good architectural design approved.

Even today, applying for hundreds of applications for medium to high density developments in Melbourne, with dual occs being a common terminology, quite often the planners can be as difficult; just like I had experienced in the early 1980’s.