Unoccupied dwellings include holiday homes, temporarily vacant dwellings, recently built dwellings and dwellings for sale or lease. Some insight into the size of dwellings can be obtained by examining the number of bedrooms per dwelling. Such data are not without limitations, however. Homes may have additional rooms which are not bedrooms e.g. study, family room, rumpus room etc. and room size will also vary. Nevertheless, the number of bedrooms provides a broad measure which can be used in combination with information on the floor area of newly constructed dwellings to assess changes in dwelling size.
Larger dwellings are on average housing fewer people than in the past.
Nature of occupancy Home ownership has long been encouraged by Australian governments through successive Commonwealth-State Housing Agreements, and through various schemes which assisted first home buyers to obtain access to low deposit home loans. Furthermore, owner-occupied homes are exempt from capital gains tax and excluded from assets tests in assessing eligibility for government benefits. However, there has been a shift in the respective proportions buying and owning. This reflects changes in the relative proportions of households in that part of the life-cyle where they are more likely to have paid off their mortgages. In addition, between 1981 and 1991 in particular, a number of other factors affected housing affordability.