Closing the Property Investment Gender Gap
More than 150 years ago in Australia, women couldn’t vote, couldn’t access the contraceptive pill (unless they had a husband), couldn’t drink in public bars, and had little to no abortion rights. When you think about how the world looks today in 2023, we’ve progressed in leaps and bounds. But we still have a way to go.
According to CoreLogic’s Women & Property Report 2023, men have the highest level of investment property ownership in Australia at 36.3%, compared with 29.5% of investment properties that are owned by women, and even higher than joint male-female ownership of investment properties (34.2%). Taking into account joint male-female ownership, males were identified as owning almost 7% more of the investment properties analysed in Australia.
The report also found that based on average weekly earnings data and the median Australian dwelling value in January ($708,613), it would take 8.3 years for a man to save a 20% deposit and 9.4 years for a woman to save the same amount.
The Annual Property Investor Sentiment Survey 2022 conducted by the Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) found only 27% of property investors surveyed were women while 71% were men.
A recent Victorian parliamentary inquiry found only about 34% of women who separate manage to own a home within five years and only 44% do so within 10 years, with stamp duty a major reason why. Divorced women were also three times more likely to rent at age 65 than married women, the inquiry found.
PIPA Chair and co-author of The Female Investor – Creating Wealth, Security, & Freedom Through Property Nicola McDougall said publicity surrounding the gender pay – and superannuation – gaps was starting to hit home for women of all ages.
“When we released our book last year, we did get pushback from some people who questioned why it was written specifically for women, which was annoying but, alas, not surprising,” Ms McDougall said.
“The reasons we wrote the book for women was because of the lack of female voices and authors in the property investment space, but also because only 27% of women identify as investors – and now we have learned that if a woman gets divorced, she has less than a 50/50 chance of continuing to be a homeowner – which is appalling.”
Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ) CEO Antonia Mercorella said gender pay figures hid the stark reality of poorer financial results for women throughout their lives.
“According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Australia’s national gender pay gap is 13.3% – similar to what it was three years ago,” Ms Mercorella said.
“To put this into perspective, women are earning on average about $253.50 less per week than men, which over the course of a year adds up to about $13,000.
“Over a decade, the gender pay gap may mean that women are more than $131,000 worse off than men financially, with that figure rising to more than a quarter a million dollars over 20 years.”
Ms McDougall said in the past, women may have been nervous about buying a property as a home or an investment – but that’s quickly changing.
“Society has changed significantly since the days when women stayed at home to look after their children while their husbands were the main breadwinners,” she said.
“However, more and more research and lived experiences are proving that the financial outcomes for women are generally going to be poorer than men – and especially for those who separate or divorce.”
A report by ME Bank found that women are a growing force in the property market, with the number of single female home loan applications increasing during the strong property price growth in 2021.
Women are also borrowing more, with the average loan size for a single female mortgage increasing by 7% to $411,752 in 2021.
And while the CoreLogic report mentioned at the top paints a fairly bleak picture, it also showed the gender gap is narrowing – albeit slowly – 28.3% of property purchases in 2021 were made by women, up from 27.4% in 2020.