So I've lived a few places now (Australia, USA, UK, Switzerland, Germany) so I've seen a few different systems. Australia has a horrible system called stamp du

So I've lived a few places now (Australia, USA, UK, Switzerland, Germany) so I've seen a few different systems. Australia has a horrible system called stamp duty, which is a tax paid on the purchase of a property based on a sliding scale of the property's purchase price. This was fine back when a house cost $100k (and you might pay $2-3k to the government). It hasn't scaled with massive housing inflation and state governments (who administer the tax) are now addicted to the revenue. The median house price in Sydney now is A$1.1m (last I checked). This seems to mean stamp duty of nearly A$50k. When household income may well be under $150k paying $50k after-tax to move is a huge barrier to moving and thus labour market flexibility. Want to move across the country for a new job? Enjoy the $100k in transaction costs for swapping houses. The US property tax system with almost no transaction taxes is far, far better (IMHO). There are exceptions (eg NYC has a "mansion tax" of 1% on properties over US$1M). Of course this will never happen in Australia because all the existing homeowners, who have already paid stamp duty (even if it was 40+ years ago), don't want to pay higher property taxes. Of course large parts of the US have voted themselves massive tax breaks for incumbents, the posterchild of which is Prop 13 in CA. All under the guise of "won't anybody think of the retirees?" (when you could individually give them tax breaks if you really wanted to). New York state has a series of property tax caps that greatly benefit established SFH dwellers (and SFH taxes are far, far lower than those on apartments/condos). The biggest downside to property in at least English speaking countries (and elsewhere no doubt) is rampant speculation. I kind of liked the Swiss system for this in many ways. Punitive taxes on short term capital gains. Also, in Switzerland, when you owned property outright, it's notional rent was deemed income. So there's no point having a property sit empty because you're being taxed on the "income" anyway.