Cross posted with permission from Capital Appreciation:
The latest Property Council of Australia (PCA) – ANZ Property Industry Confidence Survey results indicate that property professional respondents in the ACT were slightly more positive about residential property in the June 2012 quarter but they are generally negative about the overall economy. I’ve highlighted some of the charted results for the ACT below.
The property industry confidence index climbed 7 points from 94 points in the March quarter to 101 for the June quarter, with 100 being a neutral score. This neutral view on property is a lot less bullish than property professionals in other states and territories, with the exception of Victoria and Tasmania where the index is negative. Catherine Carter from the Property Council ACT somehow found that the ACT was unique by being “…the only state or territory that recorded a shift from overall negative sentiment in the March quarter to positive sentiment in the June quarter.” That certainly wins the award for most dubious real estate statistic.
Forward work schedule expectations remain positive but one wonders if that is due to the glut of properties currently being built or about to be built that will hit the market in the near future. However, the ACT work schedule expectations lag every other state and territory with the exception of Tasmania.
The rest of the ACT results were generally negative. Staffing level expectations are being pared back sharply.
National economic growth expectations have improved but remain negative.
Same for the ACT’s economic growth expectations, except that they are more bearish.
Debt finance availability expectations improved but remain negative.
Somehow, despite the above economic gloom, house price growth expectations improved markedly from the previous survey to register just above zero. One wonders if there were some stern words said amongst ACT real estate professionals after the release of the previous negative results.
Finally, planned property construction activity remained approximately neutral with the greatest activity predicted for residential construction. However, the ACT results were quite low relative to most other states and territories.
These survey results do need to be taken with a grain of salt. I find the results somewhat useful in gauging the opinions and feelings of the ACT real estate industry about the market. It’s also useful to compare the ACT results with the other Australian states and territories. However, it’s likely that there were only a small number of ACT survey respondents from the total of 2300 Australian respondents. Therefore the results can change significantly between surveys and may not be very reliable. In addition, the divergent results showing negative economic growth expectations but slightly positive house price expectations make no sense at all. One reason I can think of is that the survey respondents’ positive real estate bias has come into play. Survey respondents may also have ulterior motives in providing overly negative or positive responses to some questions.
On the whole, the results do suggest that the ACT real estate industry is aware of the greater economic factors at play but that still doesn’t stop them from being positively optimistic.