Australian Property

With good reason.

Australia’s apartment crisis continues to mushroom, with engineers warning the removal of dangerous flammable cladding will expose other building faults and will require at least $3 billion to fix.

The federal government is adamant that the states should bear the full financial cost of remediation work on buildings that have structural defects or use combustible cladding.

For a long time MB campaigned for a national Housing Minister to address affordability.

Via NAB: The trend decline in foreign buyers of Australian residential property over 2018 and into early-2019 can be attributed largely to the crackdown on capital outflows in China in recent years and to local state government charges on foreign buyers and stricter lending limits by Australian institutions.

Via S&P: Australian prime home-loan arrears stabilized in May after rising in preceding months, according to a recently published report by S&P Global Ratings. The Standard & Poor’s Performance Index (SPIN) for Australian prime mortgages was largely unchanged, declining to 1.52% in May from 1.53% a month earlier.

In October 2017, Labor’s open borders immigration extremist, Dr Andrew Leigh, penned a spurious article claiming that Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy has not pushed-up house prices: An OECD survey of the relevant studies concludes that migrants have a minimal impact on housing prices.

Via Gottiboff: So, since 1990 we have had three seven to 10-year strong markets plus three tough markets which usually lasted two to three years.

JMG Building Surveyors CEO John Massey has urged Prime Minister Scott Morrison to resolve what he says is a national crisis concerning professional indemnity insurance.

Via ANZ at the AFR today: “We have revised our forecasts and now expect prices to bottom out in coming months and rise modestly through to the end of 2019, before gaining around 3 per cent in 2020,” ANZ said.

The property lobby has won again with Victorian taxpayers to spend $600 million for rectification workers to remove flammable cladding from the state’s high-rise buildings: Victorian taxpayers will help fund major rectification works on buildings with dangerous combustible cladding, Premier Daniel Andrews says.

From CoreLogic’s quarterly auction report: CoreLogic recorded a strengthening trend in auction clearance rates over the June quarter – the last time the result was this strong was back in June 2018.

A handy table from Bloomie: The key measure is household debt-to-GDP.

Via CoreLogic, new listings continue to be very weak and unsold inventory is now down year on year: The leading mortgage index is still below last year but the gap has closed markedly: The market continues to rebalance more bullishly (or less bearishly).

Billionaire Meriton apartments developer, “Highrise” Harry Triguboff, has threatened NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian with legal action for Ryde MP Victor Dominello’s opposition to Meriton’s 1270 Meriton unit development in Sydney’s Macquarie Park.

The ANZ Bank has advised that its ‘floor rate’ for home loan customers will be reduced from 7.25% to 5.5% in response to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s (APRA) recent reforms.