Nearly 10 years after young Australians were famously urged to give up smashed avocado if they wanted a foothold in the property market, celebrity auctioneer Damien Cooley has brought the divisive argument back into the spotlight.
Cooley says many aspiring first-home buyers are undermining their savings goals by spending heavily on restaurants, cafés and entertainment rather than putting more money aside for a deposit.
The “smashed avocado” debate has since become a symbol of the wider generational clash over housing affordability, particularly between younger Australians struggling to buy and Baby Boomers who entered the market under very different conditions. The phrase took hold after demographer Bernard Salt used it in a 2016 column.
“I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more,” Mr Salt wrote in The Australian at the time.
“I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out?”
Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit on Tuesday, Mr Cooley echoed that sentiment, saying many young Australians should be staying home and saving for a deposit.
‘What are first home buyers doing to help themselves? It’s a question that I honestly say to young people all the time. A lot of these kids are out spending a fortune on going out for dinner, going out with their friends and spending so much money when they actually should be home,’ he said.
‘Perhaps their parents have helped them also to a degree, but it’s teaching them lessons on saving. ‘You save half, we’ll put in half. You save two thirds, we’ll put in a third.’ That’s a really encouraging thing for first home buyers.’
Celebrity auctioneer Damien Cooley (pictured) says young Australians are spending too much on dining out and entertainment instead of saving for their first property
A decade after millennials were told to skip smashed avocado if they ever hoped to own a home, celebrity auctioneer Damien Cooley has reignited the debate on dining out
Auctioneer Damien Cooley said first home buyers should purchase in more affordable regional areas and not set their sights on Sydney’s sought-after eastern suburbs
Mr Cooley, who has appeared on Nine’s popular home renovation program The Block, said first home buyers should purchase in more affordable regional areas such as Maitland in the Hunter Valley rather than set their sights on Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
‘I guess one of the concepts of the budgetary changes was to hopefully make properties affordable for first home buyers,’ he said.
‘But to be honest, I feel like that’s probably one of the strongest sections of the market right now.
‘It’s more challenging for a first home buyer to get something than it is for anybody else. All that’s really happened is that we’ve just stripped wealth off all those people who have worked really hard to build wealth over that time.’
New data released by the Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA) on Wednesday showed first-home buyer activity increased during the quarter, with 30,129 new loan commitments recorded, up 11 per cent from the March quarter.
First-home buyers accounted for 36.3 per cent of all owner-occupier commitments.
Their average loan decreased by 0.6 per cent over the quarter to $610,063, but remained 10 per cent higher than in the June quarter of 2025.
REIA president Jacob Caine said the results were recorded during a period of significant change in Commonwealth housing and taxation policy.
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Federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil (pictured) said the tax change son property were designed to help first-home buyers achieve what she called a ‘virtual rite of citizenship’
While first-home buyer participation increased, he warned broader affordability challenges remained.
‘Measures intended to improve opportunities for first home buyers and direct investment towards new construction must also be assessed against their impact on rental supply, investor confidence, and new housing delivery,’ he said.
‘Stable and predictable investment settings are essential, particularly while higher interest rates are already increasing financing costs for households and housing projects.’
Federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil, also speaking at the summit, defended Labor’s housing tax changes, saying they were designed to help first-home buyers achieve what she called a ‘virtual rite of citizenship’.
‘The intention of the tax changes is to put first home buyers on a level playing field for the first time,’ she said.
‘If we fast forward three or four years, we are going to wonder how we left it so long that the young people are being taxed to subsidise investors to buy a second, third, fifth, sixth property when they’re unable to get into a position to buy their first home.’
Property prices were already falling before the May budget after the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted interest rates three times this year.
However, Labor’s decision to wind back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions accelerated the downturn, with home values now falling faster and across 93 per cent of suburbs.
Should young Aussies stay home and eat so they can save for a home deposit? One celebrity auctioneer says yes
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The latest Westpac Home Ownership Report found 55 per cent of Australians agree the recent changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions will have a positive impact for aspiring homebuyers, with Gen Z respondents (70 per cent) the most optimistic about the reforms.
However, affordability pressures are continuing to reshape buyer behaviour, with three-quarters of first-home buyers willing to purchase in a location they had not originally considered.
Last week, Cotality reported home value declines had spread across Australia’s housing market during winter, with values falling across 93 per cent of capital city suburbs over the past three months.
Sydney continues to lead the pace of declines, with home values sitting 7.1 per cent below their February peak, taking the median house price to $1.5million.
Research director Tim Lawless said the figures showed the downturn was no longer confined to select markets or higher-value segments with a clear reduction in buyer demand.
‘What started as a more concentrated easing across higher-value segments has now become a much more generalised softening, with the vast majority of capital city suburbs recording some level of decline,’ he said.
‘Longer selling times, larger vendor discounting and persistently low auction clearance rates all point to a buyer’s market, yet buyers are lacking the confidence to transact at the moment.’