Australian Property

Australia experienced its largest-ever increase in mortgage refinances over the last three years.

Last week, immigration influencers like Abul Rizvi were claiming that Australia has reached ‘peak migration’: However, late last week the Department of Home Affairs released temporary visa data for October, which suggested that Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM) has continued to rise.

Oxford Economics Australia head of property and building forecasting, Tim Hibbert, has warned that Australia is facing a sustained housing shortage that will take years to unwind (if at all).

The Victorian parliament has released its report into “The rental and housing affordability crisis in Victoria”, which explicitly states that the ramp-up in the state’s population growth from the mid-2000s has caused a persistent housing shortage.

The previous decade saw an unprecedented number of apartments built across Australia’s capital cities: The boom in high-rise construction brought with it a swag of quality problems, including flammable cladding, cracking, water leaks, and balcony defects.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has released its financial aggregates for October, which continued to rebound ahead of the 0.25% Melbourne Cup Day rate hike.

CoreLogic has released its daily dwelling values index to 30 November, which shows that values rose by 0.6% at the 5-city aggregate level, driven by strong growth across Brisbane (1.2%), Adelaide (1.2%) and Perth (1.9%): By contrast, values actually fell across Melbourne (-0.1%), whereas Sydney values rose by only 0.3%.

The ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report for November is out and shows that affordability has worsened for prospective buyers, mortgage holders and renters, with worse to come in 2024.

The Australian Housing Urban Research Institute (AHURI) published a report last year claiming that the $20 billion spent by governments to assist first-time homebuyers into the market over the prior decade had increased inequality and made housing less affordable.

Earlier this month, The Guardian’s Cait Kelly wrongly blamed the reduction in shared house living over the pandemic for Australia’s rental crisis: “People leaving share houses during the pandemic lockdowns in search of more space are touted as one key reason behind the rise in low vacancy rates and high rents”.

This month’s 0.25% hike in the official cash rate (OCR) by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has had an immediate impact on house prices, especially in Melbourne and Sydney.

New forecasts from the Housing Industry Association (HIA) have rubbished the Albanese government’s target to build 1.2 million homes over five years.

The spring auction season is drawing to a close with clearance rates falling, a sign that the housing market is turning in favour of buyers.

The 2023 Risk Radar Report from credit bureau Experian shows that recent first home buyers that purchased in 2019 or later are suffering the highest rates of mortgage stress, as well as missed payments.

Brickworks CEO Lindsay Partridge has called for changes to migration settings to make it easier to import builders in order to alleviate housing shortages: “There is no use bringing in anybody if they are not a building tradie, you are wasting your time, because where are they going to live?”, Partridge told The Australian.

Last decade witnessed an unprecedented boom in high-rise apartments, concentrated in Australia’s major capital cities: This boom in apartments brought with it a swag of problems, including widespread flammable cladding, structural cracking, balcony defects, and leaks.

The baby boomer generation has won the intergenerational lottery.