Entrepreneurs thinking outside the box to help first home buyers jump on the property ladder is one way to help solve the housing affordability problem in cities such as Sydney, according to one NSW politician.

At the launch of digital property platform Kohab, which has been described as “the Tinder for real estate”, NSW parliamentary secretary for finance, service and property Alister Henskens said private initiatives such as these were allowing Sydneysiders build equity in real estate where they would otherwise be locked out of the market.

Kohab is an online marketplace that matches people with other buyers who want to co-own a property, either to live in or rent out as an investment, that would otherwise be unaffordable to purchase on their own.

“[These platforms] will allow people to, in a more manageable way, start getting equity in real estate at an earlier point in time,” Mr Henskens said.

“I’ve held four or five properties in my life, the nature of the exercise is that you want to get into the real estate market, build some equity and use that equity to buy your next property,” he said.

When asked what more could be done to help with housing affordability in Sydney, Mr Henskens said the problem was that not enough people were prepared to move out to cheaper areas.

“People in the 50s or 60s would go out west and travel into work. Now people are less willing to do that … they want their first home to be close to the city and that’s obviously where the highest prices are,” he said.

In terms of the growing intergenerational divide of home ownership between Gen Y and their parents, Mr Henskens believed the combination of first home owner schemes, stamp duty concessions and entrepreneurial platforms like Kohab would “slowly remediate the gap over time”.

Kohab isn’t the first online platform to tap into the sharing economy to allow first home buyers to fulfil their dream of owning at a time when young Australians are increasingly priced out of the market.

Other platforms that offer co-ownership of property include fractional investments like DomaCom, BrickX and CoVesta.

“If you’ve got two or three people buying together who couldn’t have possibly bought on their own then all of a sudden they’re able to get into a property and they’re able to share the costs of that property,” Kohab founder Mr Dawson said. “Their need for a deposit is halved or [cut by a] third depending on how many people they buy with”.

He argued the model was different to existing fractional investment models because Kohab was not a fund manager or an investment platform and didn’t charge management or transaction fees.

“From a platform point of view, we don’t operate through a trust – it’s real property which transfers to other people. So effectively all parties could agree to sell the property on the open market and put it on the listing portal. One person might want to buy the other person out and they’ll negotiate a price and they’ll move that ownership over. It’s around having your name on the title and splitting the title according to your ownership,” Mr Dawson.

“I think it comes down to practical basis, we’re basically saying two to four is fairly common but I guess five couples potentially buying something together as a second home or a holiday place, that’s possible as well,” Mr Dawson said.

Real Estate Institute of New South Wales president Leanne Pilkington said this latest offering was a more-secure route for many family and friends who had already gone down that path in an ad hoc way.

“I think a lot of parents will take a lot of advantage of it because we already see a lot of parents helping their children buy property. What choice do you have when the median price in Sydney is a million dollars,” Mrs Pilkington said.

“You can’t do it on your own as first home buyer so I think it will give families that security that they can do it properly,” she said.

Mr Dawson rejected claims his co-ownership business would further widen the gap between the “haves and have nots”.

“I can’t see how that would happen because we’re moving people that are renting into buying and then obviously, there will be more rental properties available so I don’t see a knock-on effect at all,” he said.