CoreLogic’s 2023 Women and Property report, released ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, found 26.8% of all properties are exclusively owned by women.
That’s compared with 29.9% of men.
While pinpointing the disparity between home ownership is difficult, CoreLogic Head of Research Eliza Owen said investment properties certainly play a big part.
“Male-only names were associated with 36.3% of investment properties, which is higher than both the share of investment properties owned by women (29.5%), and the share owned by men and women jointly (34.2%),” Ms Owen said.
“There were some hot spots where women did actually own more of the investment stock analysed than men.
“These were generally the areas that women had high ownership of dwellings overall, including the North Sydney and Hornsby SA4 region, where women had ownership of almost 39% of investment properties analysed.”
The report found female ownership was the most common across units, trumping men by 1.1%.
However, Ms Owen cautioned this has implications for the gender wealth gap.
“Detached houses, and higher-value property more broadly, has been associated with higher longer-term value growth so women may be missing out on a chunk of capital gains from the Australian housing market because of the type of properties they are purchasing,” she said.
Detached homes have seen 10-year annualised growth rates of 5.1% to January 2023 compared to 3.5% in the unit market.
| Region Type | Region Name | No. of Properties Analysed | Portion of property with female ownership | Portion of property with male ownership |
| Country | Australia | 4,650,771 | 26.8% | 29.9% |
| State | NSW | 163,703 | 30.6% | 33.7% |
| State | VIC | 1,945,471 | 28.8% | 30.7% |
| State | NT | 45,884 | 25.3% | 32% |
| State | QLD | 1,639,655 | 25.2% | 28.3% |
| State | WA | 856,058 | 24.7% | 30.1% |
| Capital city | Greater Sydney | 114,863 | 31.9% | 33.8% |
| Capital city | Greater Melbourne | 1,475,898 | 29.4% | 31.8% |
| Rest of State | Rest of NT | 9,170 | 28.6% | 30.1% |
| Rest of State | Rest of NSW | 48,840 | 27.6% | 33.4% |
| Rest of State | Rest of VIC | 469,573 | 26.8% | 27.5% |
| Capital city | Greater Brisbane | 780,672 | 25.4% | 28.8% |
| Capital city | Greater Perth | 696,631 | 25.3% | 30.2% |
| Rest of State | Rest of QLD | 858,983 | 25% | 27.7% |
| Capital city | Greater Darwin | 36,714 | 24.4% | 32.4% |
| Rest of State | Rest of WA | 159,427 | 22% | 29.6% |
Source: CoreLogic Summary of Ownership Proportions
Where women own the most housing stock
The highest rates of exclusively female home ownership was in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, where 37.3% of all properties were owned exclusively by women compared with 32.8% of men.
In North Sydney and Hornsby, 36.6% of property is exclusively owned by women while 31.8% are owned by just men.
Ms Owen said income could be an important factor, with some of the affluent, inner-city regions of Sydney seeing a higher portion of property owned by women.
“An important factor playing into whether women own a home or not, is income,” she said.
Research suggests that women are more inclined to invest in real estate than their male counterparts where they have the resources to do so.”
Women taking longer to save for their house deposit
The report found that it would take women 9.4 years to save a 20% deposit on the median Australian dwelling value, compared to 8.3 years for men - based on average weekly full time earnings data.
“While full-time earnings are used for the official measure of the gender pay gap in Australia, women are overrepresented in part-time employment, which tends to attract lower pay,” Ms Owen said.
“Based on labour force figures as of December 2022, women accounted for 68.1% of Australians in part time employment, and 38.7% of those in full-time employment.
“This further contributes to the overall pay disparity between men and women, which may have implications for access to home ownership.”
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) the gender pay gap is currently sitting at 13.3%.
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