From the SMH:
National Australia Bank’s head of retail banking, Gavin Slater, said the fundamentals were ”as good as they get”. ”We don’t believe we have a housing bubble, but our outlook is that increasing house prices will be more modest than they have been in recent times,” he said. Mr Slater was briefing journalists before a presentation to the UBS Australian Financial Services Conference in Sydney.
Westpac’s head of retail and business banking, Jason Yetton, said since April and May, applications for new loans from households had slowed, though it came against ”robust” credit growth overall.
”We have seen some slowdown, if you like, in application volumes. That would suggest that, to some degree, consumer confidence … may well have plateaued a little bit in some key markets,” Mr Yetton said after his UBS presentation.
…Mr Yetton said demand from investors was ”pretty strong”, while owner-occupier demand was ”robust”, but conditions in the first-home-buyer segment were ”really weak” because of affordability concerns. Mr Slater and Mr Yetton both said housing credit growth would be between 6 per cent and 7 per cent.
Some nice reassurance there for Fairfax’s bubble worshipers. A property price plateau will not be enough to carry the economy.
