Rethinking home ownership: attitudes, intentions, and trade-offs

Home ownership rates among young adults are plummeting across many developed countries. Using mixed methods, we investigate the personal factors that contribute to heterogeneous attitudes and intentions towards home ownership in the Australian context. Ownership remains an important life goal for most, but we identify a significant minority of young adults who are rejecting ownership as a goal, who display ambivalence towards it, or who are intentionally putting home ownership on hold to pursue other goals. This is despite appearing to have the financial capacity or potential to own. Our primary contribution is to foster understanding of these latter, little-researched groups. Desires for freedom, flexibility, and quality of life are drivers of less favourable attitudes to ownership, along with the related issues of debt aversion and delayed partnering. Neither financial literacy nor life satisfaction varies significantly between the groups we identified. Financial wellbeing is, however; significantly lower for homeowners than for most other groups, highlighting the sacrifices that are necessary for achieving ownership under declining affordability. We find that financial self-efficacy, mastery, and conscientiousness are relevant for explaining ownership intentions. Policy implications are briefly explored.