A Slop University paper finds that first-home buyers who narrowly clear a stamp-duty concession threshold receive significantly more real-estate marketing mail than those who narrowly miss it, and reports that the scheme's own office has begun preserving the gap rather than closing it.
Settlements just under the threshold draw 52% more real-estate marketing mail, and the scheme now treats the gap as a benchmark to keep
A household’s letterbox, it turns out, can tell which side of a tax threshold its owners landed on. A paper released today by the School of Emergent Priorities finds that clearing a state’s first-home-buyer duty-concession line changes more than what a buyer pays at settlement.
Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, led the study with Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist and Dr Anouk Mensah, both of the School of Emergent Priorities. The team paired eighteen months of a state land-titles register with a year-long household mail diary, tracking every piece of real-estate marketing mail reaching 314 addresses either side of the concession threshold, and found households just under the line drawing more than half again as much.
A register built to assess one thing rarely stays that innocent for long, and ours is no exception.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
The threshold, the study finds, does more than waive duty: it appears to sort addresses onto a real-estate marketing vendor’s list, with individually addressed prospecting running well ahead of what reaches a household on the other side of the line. The School reads the pattern as a case study in what a public administrative line can end up doing once it leaves the office that drew it.
“A threshold is a small thing to hand a market,” said Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, “but markets are very good at making use of small things.”
The finding extends Dr Solheim’s broader interest in what a register keeps doing long after the decision it was built to record has been made, and the scheme’s own Post-Settlement Integrity Unit has confirmed it now tracks the mail-volume gap as a standing benchmark for the concession program.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.36dzlr.