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The decision by the State Government to remove the stamp duty home concession will flatten the struggling Queensland residential property market and cost homebuyers thousands of dollars, according to the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ).

The government announced today that from 1 August the concession which non-first home buyers receive when buying a new or established home as their principal place of residence will be removed. For a median-priced house in Brisbane, homebuyers will now be hit with more than $15,000 in stamp duty – an increase of more than $7,000.

First home buyer stamp duty concessions will remain for homes up to $500,000.

The government also announced a $10,000 grant for new-home builds. The Queensland Building Boost grant will be available for all people building, or buying, a new-build home or unit priced up to $600,000 between 1 August 2011 and 31 January 2012.

REIQ chairman Pamela Bennett said while any incentive to increase housing supply and create jobs in the construction sector is a positive for the economy, the removal of the stamp duty concession for non-first home buyers will wreak havoc on the Queensland property market.

About 60 per cent of all dwellings financed in Queensland in April were to non-first home buyers.
“The market is already the lowest it has been in many years and today’s announcement will just make it worse,” she said.

“The government is obviously trying to fill the financial void that has been left by the weak property market, and the subsequent lower stamp duty receipts given the marked reduction in property sales over the past 18 months.

“A better way to stimulate the economy would have been to provide financial incentives for all buyers of all types of properties which in turn would have increased activity and therefore helped the government’s bottom-line.”

According to the REIQ, the $10,000 grant for new-builds might provide a much-needed shot in the arm for the building sector but its value will be greatly diminished by the increased rates of stamp duty that non-first home buyers will have to pay. It is also unlikely to assist more first home buyers into the market.

“There has been a huge reduction in first home buyer activity over the past year and this grant is unlikely to change that state of affairs to any significant degree,” she said.

“While the grant means first-timers will be able to access $17,000, as well as stamp duty concessions, purchasing a new-build home or unit continues to be out of the financial reach of most prospective homeowners.”

When the First Home Owners Boost was available in late 2008 and throughout 2009, 74 per cent of first home buyers purchased an established home despite $21,000 being available for constructing a new home or the purchase of a new-build.

Quote from Mike Andrew, “It’s lucky we don’t pay our Qld politicians for their brains, the property market is already in a slump and the impost of new taxes is not going to help the industry nor those people who are trying to get into the market. Why didn’t Qld look at the Victorian governments stand on stamp duty and abolish this tax which by the way, was supposed to have been removed when GST was introduced.

Like the good ship Bounty, we have our own Captain Bligh, who by her and her governments greed are destroying industry and small business in this state, the sooner an election is held to get rid of this government the better.”

Ten thousand real estate agents have left the profession in the last year due to a drop in sales and smaller commissions, according to The Australian Financial Review.

The AFR has reported that more real estate agents are leaving the industry than entering as houses are harder to sell on the back of low consumer confidence and increasing interest rates.

Real Estate Institute of Australia president David Airey estimates that the number of agents in the industry has dropped from 60,000 to 50,000 in last year.

"There’s been a huge reduction over the past year," Mr Airey told the AFR.

"There’s been a more recent trend that resignations or business closures are actually exceeding the number of new [REIA] members. Hopefully that’s a short-term trend," he said.

Story source: www.exitfeesmeancompetition.com

First homebuyers across Victoria will save thousands of dollars in stamp duty as the state government makes good on its promise to slash the tax in its first budget.

The government will proceed with its commitment to slash stamp duty by 20 per cent for first home buyers on properties valued less than $600,000 from July 1.

This equates to almost $5,800 in stamp duty savings on the median house price of $565,000.

Real Estate Institute of Victoria chief executive Enzo Raimondo hailed the move as the most significant attempt to help people buy their first home in 10 years.

"Over the last decade there has been a bit of tinkering by the previous government but not much relief," he said.

"It’s a first genuine step to address the affordability issue for first homebuyers."

Before the last election, the coalition promised to halve stamp duty for first homebuyers by 2014.

Mr Raimondo said the government should also overhaul the stamp duty rates.

"Stamp duty needs to be reviewed again and significant changes made because it is double what it was 10 years ago," he said.

Cutting stamp duty will impact on a major source of revenue for the government, with Treasury predicting before the last election the government would collect $3.8 billion from the tax in 2011-12.

Treasurer Kim Wells delivers his first budget on Tuesday.

The Victorian Employers’ Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI) is calling on the government to introduce performance pay incentives for teachers.

VECCI senior policy manager Andrew Rimington said with the flat-lining of Victorian students’ year nine national testing results, lifting the standard of teaching could help turn this trend around.

He said the business sector was concerned too many students were leaving school before finishing year 12.

Mr Rimington said poor numeracy and literacy was particularly an issue in areas of high social disadvantage.

"One of the things we can do is to reward teachers who are performing better and getting results with their students," he told AAP.

"Performance pay is something that’s accepted in the corporate world and the public service and it is worth a try to see how that sort of approach could in fact see changed behaviour."

He said a trial incentive pay program for teachers, along with 1000 retraining scholarships over four years for areas of teacher shortages like maths, would cost up to $16 million over four years.

Mr Rimington said bonuses could be paid to attract teachers to disadvantaged areas.

Low levels of literacy and numeracy among workers was slowing productivity, he said.

"We have got to put in a circuit breaker somewhere to start to address these crucial issues for the existing stock of students in schools now," he said.

© 2011 AAP

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The Harcourts property franchise will team up with rural services business Landmark in a bid to challenge the dominance of the Elders real estate brand.

The deal, announced yesterday, will cover both companies’ regional and rural real estate operations by April in the joint venture, Landmark Harcourts.

The new business will include some of Harcourts’ 280 Australian offices and Landmark’s 125 rural real estate branches and is expected to turn over some $20 billion in property sales a year.

The existing Landmark real estate business will be rebranded as a part of an equal-party joint venture that will be ”integrated into the greater Harcourts family,” Harcourts Australasian head Bryan Thomson said.

Since its formation in New Zealand in 1888, Harcourts has established a network of 640 real estate franchises in Australia, Indonesia, South Africa and China.

Landmark’s rural services business operates from 400 locations in Australia.

The new business will incorporate the companies’ rural and regional operations and leave Harcourts’ metropolitan business unchanged.

Story by Simon Johanson www.smh.com.au

At Google one of our key philosophies is to take risks and to experiment. To that end, in July 2009 we announced the ability to find property for sale or rent directly on Google Maps. This is one of the “search options” next to the search box on Google Maps, and is currently available in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan.

In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.

We’ve learned a lot and been excited to see real estate companies use Google Maps in innovative ways to help people find places to live, such as Coldwell Banker’s use of Google Maps and YouTube, or Realtor.com’s Android app that lets you draw a shape on a map to find all properties you’re interested in.

Yet we recognize that there might be better, more effective ways to help people find local real estate information than the current feature makes possible. We’ll continue to explore this area, but in the meantime, Google offers other options to home-seekers: you can still access other information in Maps such as local businesses, directions and transit times, as well as aerial and Street View imagery to explore where you might want to move, and also use Google search results to find helpful real estate information and websites.

Real estate companies can also continue to use tools from Google to help connect with buyers and renters who use the Internet to research properties. For example, companies can use the Google Maps API to embed customized maps that are useful to potential clients right on their own web pages. Our Google for real estate professionals site contains various methods for generating leads and improving real estate business operations.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP, Google Earth and Maps

Australia experienced one of the strongest housing markets in the world during 2010, new research shows.

But likely interest rate hikes will slow the market in 2011, the Global Real Estate Trends report predicts.

The report, released by Canada’s Scotiabank, tracked the housing markets in 12 advanced economies throughout 2010.

Home prices increased in Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

They remained flat in Germany and the United States, and fell in Ireland, Italy, Japan and Spain.

Australia led the pack, thanks to relatively-low unemployment and tight housing supply.

But interest rate hikes and a cut to the first homeowners grant slowed a "red-hot" property market in 2010 to some degree, the report said.

Economist Adrienne Warren anticipates the Reserve Bank of Australia will lift interest rates by an additional 75 basis points in 2011.

Australia’s close trade ties with Asia and resource wealth would continue to underpin a solid pace of domestic activity.

"Higher interest rates will worsen already strained affordability," Ms Warren said in a statement.

Canada’s market also fared well, but was "one of the most volatile" expected to be tempered by more moderate employment and income growth in 2011.

The UK property market staged a strong early-year recovery while Germany’s decade-long housing slump also came to an end.

But it was a different story in Spain, Ireland and Italy, where the market continues to fall.

Japan’s two-decade long property slump continued in 2010, and is expected to slump further in 2011 on the back of a weaker economy.

The surprise result came from the US where the housing market stabilised.

That trend is expected to continue, with the report predicting the US Federal Reserve to maintain its record-low 0.25 per cent rate through the end of 2011.

Source: www.ninemsn.com.au

Swatting down recent rumors that it’s launching an e-mail killer, Facebook today unveiled a new messaging system that will envelope e-mail, instant messages, Facebook messages and SMS.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched what he calls a "modern messaging system" to handle the convergence of different kinds of messages and bring them together under one social umbrella. The system, which has been in the works for about 15 months, is designed to save all messages for five years, meaning users will have a history of their communications.

Although people will now be able to have a facebook.com e-mail address, Andrew Bosworth, a software engineer at Facebook, noted that the new system will work with other e-mail systems, such as Gmail and Yahoo mail.

"People should share however they want to share," said Bosworth. "If you want to send me an e-mail and I want to get it in a text message, that should work."

At this point, the messaging system — code-named Titan — will not include voice chat. Zuckerberg said that should be coming down the road, but offered no timeline.

More than four billion messages are sent every day on Facebook, with the vast majority of the messages between two people, according to Zuckerberg. And about 350 million people use Facebook to message their friends and family members.

He said he started thinking about those numbers after talking with a group of high school students who told him that they rarely use e-mail. It’s too slow, they told him. "I was kind of boggled by this," Zuckerberg said. "I remember having a similar conversation with my parents about why e-mail was good and regular mail was slow…. At Facebook, we’re all so used to using e-mail. It’s interesting to see that all kinds of folks don’t see it that way."

So Facebook decided to create a new messaging system that would include e-mail, expand on the concept and tie in other means of communication as well. "It’s not e-mail," said Zuckerberg. "It handles email, in addition to Facebook messages, and IM and SMS. People are going to be able to have facebook.com email addresses but this won’t be the primary way people use this system."

For the last three or four days, the Internet has been abuzz with speculation that Facebook was getting ready to launch an e-mail killer. Zuckerberg kicked off today’s news event by saying that’s not the case.

"There was a lot of press leading up to this saying this is an e-mail killer," he added. "This is not an e-mail killer. It’s a messaging system that has e-mail as one part of it. I don’t expect people to wake up tomorrow and say, ‘I’m going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account.’ We expect that more people will IM and more people will message just because it’s simpler and easier and it’s more fun and valuable to use."

ELDERS has scrapped its usual practice of publicising internal financial forecasts.

The move comes after the company unveiled a $217 million annual loss following a string of profit warnings.

While the rural services provider claims to have turned its operating performance around, delivering on its latest guidance provided in June, its underlying profit of $3m was far from the $55.7m profit promised late last year when it undertook a $550m equity raising.

Three of Elders’ four business divisions — rural, forestry and corporate — saw sales and earnings plummet during the year to September 30 due to lower demand in drought-affected areas, pricing pressures and a subdued real estate market.

Significant non-recurring items of $220m included plantation and property revaluations and a write-down from the collapse of Forest Enterprises Australia. The poor result saw most of the company’s management team forgo their short-term bonuses.

However, Elders boss Malcolm Jackman has insisted that recent trading showed the company was on track for an improvement next year.

He said the past three months had seen extensive efforts regarding the Cost to Serve project, which is aiming to re-align business expenses with changed market conditions, with a 9 per cent reduction in full-time staff achieved so far.

Elders has declined to provide specific guidance for the year ahead, citing the "inherent uncertainty" of seasonal and market conditions.

Shares, which have shed two-thirds of their value this year, closed up half a cent at 62.5c.

Story by Rebecca Urban www.theaustralian.com.au

The next social media training day, this time for real estate agents will take place in The Great Northern Room, Ellerslie Event Centre, Ellerslie Racecourse Auckland New Zealand on Wednesday the 6th of October.

The morning session is now fully booked, so the only session now available is the afternoon session commencing at 1:30pm.

You can download the flyer with all the information on the sessions Social Media Training Day New Zealand Registration Form or you can book by faxing the completed registration form to 00617 5534 1046, you can also email your registration form to amazing@iangrace.com.au.

The afternoon session is filling very fast as room is limited, so the earlier you register, the more likely you’ll reserve yourself a place.

Your speakers for the day will include Ian Grace and Mike Andrew

I’ll look forward to working with you on the day.