After the latest raise in interest rates everybody are talking even more about housing affordability crisis. The builders say that people who don’t already own a house (which they can sell) simply can not buy a house. “First home buyers just aren’t buying”, they say.

So how do you check what kind of house (if any) you can afford? First, you need to see how much money you can spend - to get an idea what your limits are. Probably a good idea would be to play with one of the mortgage calculators - here is an example.

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At first, it was a kind of mystery to me, why the houses in Australia keep going up in prices. My logic was saying that over time the house is getting older, this is why it should become cheaper, but reality shows exactly the opposite. People with more experience in real estate were saying that it’s the land price that goes up, not the house.

This got me thinking that if land is the main factor in a real estate deal, then the bigger the block your house stands on – the better. But what is considered a big block? That question sent me chasing statistics, and I found a very useful source – HIA Economics group site.

Their research says that the average size of land blocks we build houses on got smaller over the time. The average size for Australian capital cities in 1993-94 was 802 square meters, and then in 2003-04 it went down to 735 square meters. But in Melbourne it is even smaller: in 1993-94 the average size was 716 square meters and in 2003-04 it shrunk to 571.

So here I was, reading this ad about a beautiful house on a huge block of land. To be more specific, it was sitting on 1 acre allotment and I was thinking – how really big is it, how many square meters is one acre?

It’s a fact that people from different countries use different measurement units, a person from Europe is used to square meters and kilometers, while someone from US is used to square feet, yards and miles and in Australia they use both square meters and acres. And most of us know that there are feet, meters, acres and hectares but we never know how to do the conversions between those.

So for all of those wondering, here goes: