Doing fraud to get house in Australia

First home buyers forward dating contract to get extra grant money | NEWS.com.au

INQUIRY rates on new and established homes jumped 80 per cent in the week after the new grant was announced.

HOUSE sales in some areas of country Victoria have leapt 300 per cent on the back of first-home buyers in rural areas being eligible for state and federal grants totalling $29,000 on new homes.

MORE than 1300 wrongly claimed first-home grants, worth almost $11 million, have been detected since the scheme began in 2000.

RORTERS have been fined $411,000 in the past year alone and ineligible applicants forced to pay back $3.7 million in the same period.

AMONG frauds detected by the State Revenue Office inspectors were greedy investors and owners of multiple properties.

ALMOST 300,000 Victorians have received $2.9 billion in first-home grants since 2000.

The new grants, coupled with low interest rates and falling prices, are luring potential first-home buyers.

But the influx of new money has sparked fears prices could spiral out of reach of ordinary Australians.

While industry figures remain cautious, early data shows sales rose in October on the back of the grant boost.

Australian Finance Group, which controls about 10 per cent of the national mortgage market, said a surge in first-home buyers saw Victorian mortgage sales soar by 25.1 per cent in October.

With house sales drying up as the global financial crisis hit home, developers had slowed building new homes.

Nick Collishaw, head of Mirvac, said some of its projects had been put on hold for three to six months. But a fortnight ago it sold 36 homes, mostly to first-home buyers, compared with 15 the week before.

The grant increase has sparked a sales boom in regional Victoria.

Villawood boss Rory Costelloe said sales at the company's Bendigo estates had skyrocketed 300 per cent.