National off-the-plan apartment sales have tumbled by as much as a third over the past year as developers abandon or put projects on hold due to falling investor demand, a pullback in funding from the major banks and fewer offshore buyers.
Property consultants Urbis counted 1905 sales over the June quarter, based on a survey of 39 per cent of the 100,000 apartments being developed in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and the Gold Coast. This was down from 3044 a year earlier when the group surveyed a slightly higher 46 per cent of projects.
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David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
