According to Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), a total of 13,198 residential real estate applications were approved for proposed investment in the 2016/17 financial year, totalling $25.2 billion.
As seen in the chart below, that was well down on the 26,951 approvals, totalling $47.2 billion, granted in the 2015/16 financial year.
For clarity, approvals are indicative of potential rather than actual investment.
The 2016/17 figure was the lowest since 2012/13 financial year.
…Despite the total reduction in residential approvals last financial year, the FIRB said that Victoria and New South Wales remained the favourite destination for investment, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all approvals granted.
By type of investment, the FIRB said that the vast majority of approvals were for investment, not to buy existing dwellings.
FIRB doesn’t collect much data on existing property purchases so why would it have any? Still, I reckon the drop will be similar.
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.
