Exploring Dual Housing Tenure Status as a Household Response to Demographic, Social and Economic Change

Abstract

This article proposes that single housing tenure categories do not enable an understanding of the ways in which households use, occupy and own residential properties in the context of broad demographic, economic and social changes. Adapting work on sub-tenure housing choice, housing tenure is overlaid with ownership of residential property to develop four tenure types: Owner, Owner-Owner, Renter and Renter-Owner. Applying this typology in the Australian case provides valuable new insights, with 1.5 million households having dual housing tenure status, including almost one in eight private renters. More broadly, reconceptualising housing tenure to include ownership of other residential property can contribute to theoretical debates about household income and wealth; social status and identity; and social practices and life planning, potentially generating new research questions such as the extent to which Renter-Owners reflect new patterns of living or a response to affordability constraints, and the social identity and political affiliations of those with a dual tenure status.

Keywords::

• Housing tenure
• housing wealth
• housing investment
• housing pathways
• private rented housing
• home ownership

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge three anonymous reviewers and Terry Burke for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹ The rationale for this change was that loans secured against the dwelling in which the household usually resides for consumption of investment unrelated to that dwelling has the same security as one for a traditional mortgage to purchase the dwelling, with both being classified as owners with a mortgage (ABS, 2001, p. 14).

² Based on equivalised disposable household income.

³ Ioannides & Rosenthal (1994) label these categories R1, R2, Own 1 and Own 2 in their modelling.

⁴ The definition of residential property for the purpose of the ABS Survey of Income and Housing 2009–2010 includes land zoned for residential purposes, and the property may be in the construction stage.

⁵ Income units are defined as one person or a group of related persons within a household whose command over income is assumed to be shared (ABS, 1998).

⁶ Real estate agents are businesses that sell and manage residential properties.