Above, find the house price movements for February. There are a few eye-popping numbers, not least being Melbourne up 1.84% on the month and Perth down 1.8%.
It’s possible to construct a favourable narrative for Sydney given the recent FHB activity, but some of these others look in need of smoothing. I know these are February numbers and we only have credit data for January, but there is no indication of increased credit sufficient to drive the Victorian rises, at least prior to February. We shall see if it suddenly happened Feb 1 as the data comes in. Conversely, there is evidence for an organic increase in mortgage flows in Perth, yet it’s prices were hammered on the month. Here is the Housing Finance chart for December (the latest we have):
And the leading indicator for Housing Finance, AFG data for VIC for January:
And WA:
I’m not in the habit of questioning data, and perhaps February has delivered a credit bonanza, but I’ll need to see correlation in the credit flows before I accept some of these state-by-state housing numbers.
