Shares, term deposits v property: The search for yields

Australian blue chip shares typically provided better tax breaks, less effort and lower costs than property, but investors still are still flooding the booming Sydney property market.

Fully franked dividend income from top-performing bank shares typically provide more than double the rental income from a Sydney house before management fees and maintenance costs, suggests Tony Bates, joint principal of Bluepoint Consulting, an advisory group that specialises in high-net-worth clients.

"The income that lands in your pockets is much better from shares than it is from houses, and a substantial part of the difference is tax and costs," Bates told the Australian Financial Review in an article on the income dilemma for those who have traditionally relied on fixed-term deposits to contribute to their income.

Bates undertook a comparison of income returns from term deposit accounts, blue chip shares and an investment property.

An $800,000 investment in a 12-month term deposit with Westpac Bank offering about 3% will pay about $24,800 on maturity, or around $476 a week.

Alternatively, an investor might consider investing $800,000 in a three-bedroomed house (rather than typical two bedroom unit) on the outskirts of Sydney, paying weekly rental income of about $600, which is $31,200 a year.

The investor would be left with about 3%, or around $450 a week, after agent's fees, land tax and maintenance costs. The third investment scenario involved about 21,000 Westpac shares which will pay about $41,800, or more than $800 a week, plus franking credits of $17,600, or around $340 a week – a total return of more than $1,140 a week. 

"So if you can imagine $800,000 of Westpac shares as a rental property, it will cost you less to buy, nothing to maintain and it will pay about $1140 per week in your pocket, compared with somewhere between $450 and $600 per week from the property," Bates suggested.

Of course one of the reasons property has become popular is spreading the risk as the focus on high-yielding stocks exposes investors to heightened ‘concentration risk’, as well as to the normal equity risk of the share market.

The broking firm Credit Suisse estimated recently that since June 2005 the self managed super funds have ploughed $121 billion into shares – equivalent to one-third of net new equity issuance over the period.

With about 32% of their assets held in Australian shares, Credit Suisse says SMSFs now own more than 16% of the Australian share market, or about $229 billion worth of shares.

Andrew Aitken, Bennelong Funds Management’s head of distribution, noted because super funds have a lower tax rate than the company tax rate of 30%, they receive cash rebates of the franking credits that they’re unable to use to offset their tax.

"If an SMSF is in ‘accumulation phase’, its tax rate is 15% and it gets a partial tax refund of $215 for every $1,000 of fully franked dividends it receives. For such investors, a dollar of fully franked dividend income is effectively worth more than a dollar," said Aitken.

"It is even better when the SMSF moves to ‘pension phase’; that is, it is paying pensions to its members.

"The assets are held in the fund’s ‘pension account’, which means they are being used solely for the purpose of paying out a pension.

"In this instance, there’s no tax on the income or capital gains from the assets and the franked dividends can actually be refunded fully by the ATO.

"The fund gets a tax refund of $429 for every $1,000 of fully franked dividends it receives, which can turbo-charge the nominal dividend yield quite spectacularly."

For example, on market consensus forecasts, Telstra is expected to pay a fully franked dividend of 32.2 cents in FY16. At a share price of $6.60, that dividend would represent a nominal dividend yield of 4.9% – more than attractive when the official interest rate is 2.25%, and a one-year term deposit will pay you about 3.3%.

But to an SMSF in accumulation phase, that nominal yield of 4.9% becomes – courtesy of the partial franking credits rebate – effectively the equivalent of 5.9%. And to a pension-paying fund, receiving a full rebate of the unused franking credits, Telstra’s effective yield rises almost to 7%. In a low interest rate environment, that is a massive attraction.

SMSFs investing for yield in this way account for a massive chunk of the self-managed funds’ share of the sharemarket. Telstra and Commonwealth Bank are some of the SMSFs’ favourite stocks: as at their most recent annual reports, Telstra has 1.4 million shareholders, while CBA has 770,000.

Other popular blue-chip ‘income’ stocks include Westpac (596,000 shareholders), National Australia Bank (533,000), ANZ Bank (500,000), Wesfarmers (514,000) and Woolworths (441,000). Add BHP (555,000 Australian shareholders) and Rio Tinto (207,000 Australian shareholders) and you have about 60% of the Australian market’s value.

"That is unacceptably high concentration risk," Aitken concluded.