The rate of single buyers able to afford a property has declined since 2014

If you want to buy a home, you’ll need to date like your property dreams depend on it.

As house prices rise and the cost of living pinches, Aussies singles are falling behind on property ownership.

The number of unpartnered people able to afford a home has been declining over the past 10 years, from more than a quarter of all transactions in 2014, dipping to 24.5 per cent in 2022.

As if enduring Hinge, Bumble and Tinder isn’t hard enough,  an increasing volume of singletons are frozen out of property ownership. Ray White’s weekly economic wrap reveals in 2014, about 26.2 per cent of purchasers were single. However, by 2022, that rate had decreased to 24.5 per cent.

However, Ray White economist Nerida Conisbee noticed the proportion of single females buying property has been on the up since 2014.

“In that year, there were 64,680 purchases made by single women,” she wrote in the report.

“That had increased to 71,900 women by 2022. The only category that increased more quickly was a rise in the number of companies/trusts purchasing property, perhaps driven by a rise in people using self managed superannuation to buy property, as well as growing interest by large corporations in owning investment properties.”

The majority of female home purchasers are in Victoria and New South Wales has the lowest rate, the research found.

Conisbee said a driving force is education around the security of buying a home, as well as government assistance schemes that help low to middle-income earners get into the market.

“When looking more specifically at a suburb level, large scale development of more affordable apartments in central areas also appears to play a role,” she said. “Overwhelmingly, the largest number of purchases are of units in areas where very large numbers of units are available. The top locations for house purchases are also predominantly affordable fringe development areas.”

The data was gathered and calculated using Valuer General figures on all sales from 2014. First names were cross referenced using Genderize, an AI tool that nominates the likely gender based on a name, Ray White said in the report.

In February, data was released that showed single people who are young or on low incomes are finding it tougher than ever to afford rent, let alone stretch that to a mortgage.

Only 22.8 per cent of single, low-income tenants were paying what was deemed affordable rent in 2020, a study from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute revealed. The institute analysed an ABS survey of income and housing for 2019 and 2020.