The general consensus after last week’s budget is that price of old properties will drop, because they can’t be negatively geared, and the cost of new ones will rise, because they can.

That way, the tax-payer is effectively subsidising the building of much-needed new apartments (which is what negative gearing was originally designed to do) without adding to the overheating of the established property market.

Whether you think that “lost” money would be better spent building new homes directly is a discussion that’s philosophical and political as much as it’s financial and economic.

It may even be that property investors abandoning old homes will drive prices down and that might pull in renters who’ve previously been priced out of the market. We shall see.

But one aspect that’s not being widely considered is the probable micro-political shift in the management of new apartment blocks. 

If new apartments are the only properties where investors can both negatively gear and accumulate value (albeit without such generous capital gains tax benefits), then that’s where the investors will go.

As a result, new apartment blocks will be dominated by landlords, rather than owner-occupiers, and that will inevitably lead to a radical shift in the priorities of their owners corporations.

Committees of engaged residents will be subject to the overriding power of majorities of absentee owners. Everything will be decided remotely on Zoom or, even worse, electronically

At the risk of over-simplifying the issue, if your AGMs are dominated by the votes of people whose main concern is to protect their profits rather than those whose hopes are to build a community – if only because they have to live in it – you can see how the votes will fall.

These aims are not mutually exclusive but money talks while hopes and dreams walk.

So my advice for anyone buying an apartment to live would be to look for an older block where they may have had problems but they have been resolved and there’s a record of that having occurred. Olsder units are likely to be cheaper for a while as investors flee the ungearable property sector.

For the next two or three years I would not buy a new or off-the-plan apartment to live in it. The likelihood of being outvoted by investors who may never have set foot in your block are higher than ever.

For the time being, let them sweat over the cost-benefits of pursuing defect claims and challenging embedded networks while you get on with building a community of like-minded owners and renters.

The protections for strata resident-owners are too flimsy and the opportunities for the scammers and shysters are as great as ever. Buy an old flat and let the profiteers fight it out among themselves.

A version of this post originally was sent out with last week’s newsletter.