I did see the article too. I think it was actually Steve McKnight who said that we may adopt the European norm of renting for life.
The way I see it, the middle class population will shrink, and in 20 years we will have a very defined group of "have's" and "have not's".
With respect to D's comments, I totally agree that property prices have gone nuts – What I will say though is that there is no way we can continue growing at the same rates we have in the last 6 months for the next 3 years… By the end of next year the cash rate will probably be more like 5.5% which will make a big difference to affordability. There is definitely strong demand, but as the govt opens up more land to increase supply, whilist mortgages become more expensive, there will be a flattening, and maybe even a slight decrease in property prices.
And in fact the best way to do it is with interest only loans. Make sure you pay all available funds into the offset account rather than reducing interest.
Provided you are disciplined enough and will not spend the money, your investment loan should be interest only, and accompanied by an offset account – There are dozens of articles on this topic throughout the site so I won't go into detail on it, but feel free to have a search around to see the reasons behind.
The debt % does make a difference to what you can purchase down the track if prices stagnate for a while or even go backwards. It is worth considering what else you may need/want to purchase in the near future, and this adds more weight to reasons behind having an offset account for your spare cash. (ie: redraw for personal purposes against an investment loan can be a pain in the a$$ at tax time).
The reason for this is that it preserves the deductibility of the loan, whilst still reducing the interest.
This means that if you need to use the offset money for something later on, you don't need to do a re-draw from the loan (which may not be tax deductible if you are using it for personal use).
Hope this makes sense. Let me know if it doesn't and I will explain further.