i bailed on an investment property after the budget, and i reckon everyone pilling into new builds is walking into a trap

Bit of a brain-dump, happy to be told Im wrong.

I'd been lining up an established place for most of last year, deposit ready, pre-approval sorted, the lot. Then May 12 happened, I sat on my hands, and a few weeks later I officially pulled out.

Everyone's reading the negative gearing change as "property investing is dead." I don't think that's quite it. If you buy an established place after budget night you can technically still negative gear, the losses just get quarantined, so you can only offset them against rental income or future property gains, not your salary, and you carry the rest forward. Annoying, but for anyone who was going to be roughly cashflow neutral anyway it's not the apocalypse people are making it out to be.

What's actually doing my head in is the carve out. New builds keep full negative gearing AND get to pick either the 50% CGT discount or the new indexation method. So the entire policy now screams "go buy a new build." And we all know what happens when you herd a few hundred thousand investors toward one product — developers price the tax benefit straight into the stock, you cop a place with bugger-all land content, and the fittings depreciation tapers off fast. Smells like a honey pot.

So now Im sitting on the deposit and genuinely torn. Half of me wants to just dump it into BGBL/VGS, never think about tenants or land tax again, and call property a closed chapter. The other half reckons that's the lazy answer and there's a version of the new-build play that works if you're ruthless about the land-to-build ratio.

Has anyone actually run post-budget new build vs 100% equities with real numbers? Or am I overthinking a change that isn't even law yet?