Top real estate figure tells Gen Z hopefuls they should stop eating at cafes if they one day want to buy a house
Celebrity auctioneer Damien Cooley has reignited the decade-old "smashed avocado" debate, telling young Australians they spend too much on dining out and entertainment instead of saving for a first home deposit. Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit, he suggested first home buyers should consider more affordable regional areas, such as Maitland in the Hunter Valley, rather than fixating on expensive suburbs, and praised savings arrangements where parents match a child's deposit contributions.
His remarks echo demographer Bernard Salt's 2016 column, which blamed young people's café spending for housing unaffordability and became a lasting flashpoint in generational tensions over the property market. New Real Estate Institute of Australia data released the same week showed first-home buyer loan commitments rose 11 per cent in the June quarter to 30,129, making up 36.3 per cent of owner-occupier commitments, with an average loan of $610,063. REIA president Jacob Caine welcomed the rise but cautioned that broader affordability pressures remain, urging that housing and tax policy changes be weighed against their effects on rental supply and investor confidence.
- Auctioneer says young Aussies should cut café spending to save for a house
- Echoes 2016 "smashed avocado" housing affordability row
- First-home buyer loans rose 11% in June quarter, data shows
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Damien Cooley is a well-known Australian auctioneer who has stirred up an old argument about house prices, telling young people they should cut back on cafes and eating out if they want to save enough for a deposit. It is a modern echo of a comment made in 2016 by demographer Bernard Salt, who caused a similar stir by blaming smashed avocado brunches for young Australians struggling to afford homes. This idea has become a shorthand in Australia for the wider debate about whether high property prices are mainly down to spending habits, or to bigger economic forces beyond individual control.
The backdrop to these comments is Australia's long-running housing affordability problem, in which house prices in major cities have risen much faster than wages, making it harder for younger generations to buy their first home. Figures from the Real Estate Institute of Australia show more first-home buyers have recently taken out loans, though the average loan size remains high, and industry figures continue to debate what mix of savings advice, housing supply and government policy might help.
This matters because it touches on a sensitive generational divide: many younger Australians feel frustrated when told that lifestyle choices, rather than structural issues like supply, wages or investor demand, are the main barrier to home ownership. Comments like Cooley's tend to attract strong reactions precisely because they revive this long-standing tension over who or what is really responsible for the housing affordability squeeze.