Opinion: Rethinking the Australian dream

Alice Stolz, Domain’s National Managing Editor, The Block fixture and resident property aficionado, shares her insights each week as columnist for Nine Property.

We need to rethink the great Australian dream. Undoubtedly, property ownership makes an abundance of sense financially as well as practically, but it is more than that.

It’s the security it brings, today as well as tomorrow. And ultimately, the sense of place and belonging. Every Australian should be able to access that, should they so desire and should they be willing to work for it. But it needn’t be lavish and plush. It needn’t be in a certain postcode and it needn’t be a quarter-acre block.

Property purchasing for many is all about compromise. Whether that be location (worst house, best street), property type (have you seen the gaping distance between the price of a home compared with units?) or the condition of a property (there can be true delight in the back breaking task of renovating).

My husband and I bought our first home late. We were the first-home buyers with three children in tow.

So we entered a market that had risen exponentially and rather than buying a picture-perfect family home, we paid for potential. Unrenovated, unheated and almost unliveable but oozing in charm and a sense of ‘what could be’ – or so the agent kept telling us.

A tight and crimped budget dictated that the work on the house would not be lavish. We had to be considered. We had to be clever and nifty. And in the end, this discipline steered us to make choices that have benefited us as a family.

We hid a huge chimney that would have cost a fortune to remove. We covered up crucial beams that to delete would have cost the price of a new car. And we did simple things like reversing the way doors swung to make rooms work in a more effective way.

We compromised. Again and again. Oh, and we painted (don’t underestimate the magic of colour when something needs a refresh).

We reconfigured the layout rather than expanding the footprint. There is no super-sized living area. No butler’s pantry. No spa-style bathroom. No kids’ retreat. No parent retreat. No walk in robes. These are luxuries which some people increasingly perceive as standard.

In my case, we realised through necessity that we didn’t need acres of space, we needed a house that would help us to function as a family. A home to act as a nest that we could come together in, not drift further apart.