Housing occupancy and costs 2009-10

• Australian Bureau of Statistics

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18 November 2011This publication presents data from the Survey of Income and Housing (SIH) on Australian housing occupancy and costs, and relates these to characteristics of occupants and dwellings such as tenure, family composition of household, dwelling structure, age, income and main source of income. It also includes value of dwelling estimates, and information on recent home buyers.

The publication includes a feature article on first home buyers in Australia.

Changes in this issue which have impacted on the data include:

• an increase in sample size from 9,345 households in 2007-08 to 18,071 households in 2009-10 due to an expansion in the SIH sample for an extra 4,200 households, located outside capital cities as well as an additional sample of metropolitan households whose main source of income was a government pension, benefit and/or allowance.
• the inclusion of a benchmark for the value of government benefit cash transfers to ensure that the survey estimate of government benefit cash transfers is maintained at a proportion of aggregate benefit cash transfers that is consistent with previous SIH cycles (this benchmark was last used in the 2000-01 SIH).
• additional housing topics collected in 2007-08, including housing mobility, housing condition and dwelling characteristics, home purchase for first home buyers, loan financing for owners with a mortgage and rental arrangements, were not collected in 2009-10.
• disability questions for persons aged 15 years and over were asked in the 2009-10 SIH.