By Leith van Onselen
Following on from yesterday’s State Government data showing the depressed state of Victorian housing transfers and mortgage finance commitments, below are some charts showing similar trends for Queensland taken from Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) data on housing transfers and mortgage lodgements.
Like the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment statistics, the DERM data is current to February 2012, so it leads the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Housing Finance data, which is due to be released later this morning for the month of January.
First, below is a chart plotting housing transfers against mortgage lodgements:
As you can see, both the number of transfers and mortgage lodgements are above the same time last year, but remain incredibly weak relative to the past decade.
The below charts plot both series against the average number of transfers/mortgage lodgements over the life of the series. First, the transfers data:
According to DERM, housing transfer volumes in February were 36% below average levels.
And below is the mortgage lodgments chart:
Mortgage lodgements were 35% below average levels, according to DERM.
January showed a decent bounce in mortgage lodgements between December 2011 and January 2012, from 11,296 to 13,196, only to fully reverse-out in February (to 11,274). Based on this, we should expect Queensland to show some solid growth in housing finance commitments in today’s ABS Housing Finance release for the month of January; although it looks like weakness will resume in February.
