Australian Property

Via the FT: Sales of Manhattan apartments — some of the priciest properties in the US — have declined by the most in almost a decade, as potential buyers hesitate following the introduction of the new tax law.

The AFR has cautionary tale today  for Sydney’s army of would-be landlords: Prices are falling in Sydney’s off-the-plan apartment market, creating conflict between vendors who want to sell and developers who want to maintain prices.

Via The Guardian: Richard Di Natale makes the case for a nationalised bank – “the People’s Bank” – to address lacklustre competition in Australia’s banking industry, in his address to the National Press Club on Wednesday.

By Leith van Onselen From SQM Research comes stock on market figures for the month of March, which reported a (mostly) seasonal 6.3% lift in total for sale listings over the month but also a 3.8% decline over the year: Listings rose across all jurisdictions in March.

ABC’s The Business on Thursday evening ran a segment on the $50-billion mortgage broking industry, which has been accused of dodgy dealings during the Banking Royal Commission.

By Leith van Onselen After last week’s brief reprieve, the deflation of Sydney’s housing market continued this week, with values falling another 0.17% in the week ended 29 March: Sydney home values have now declined by a cumulative 4.2% over the past 29-weeks, with values also down 4.1% over the past 34 weeks.

Via APRA’s February banking statistics, investment mortgage lending was up just 0.1% month on month in February and 1.7% year on year.

Via Domainfax: “We haven’t had a government prepared to stand up to set a medium-term policy agenda in any area and seek to deliver it,” Mr Hewson told Domain.

By Leith van Onselen The ATO has thrown some more sand in the gears of Australia’s landlord army, announcing a crack-down on holiday home owners that claim full-year deductions.

More from Martin North’s surveys today: Today we continue our analysis of the latest results from our Household Surveys by drilling down into the segment specific analysis, having in our previous post looked at the changing dynamics across our household segments.

Via the AFR: Activity in Australia’s capital city apartment markets tumbled dramatically last year as developers launched just 128 projects, compared with 248 in 2016, new figures from consultants Urbis show.

Via Martin North today: The latest release of the Digital Finance Analytics Household Survey to end March 2018, helps to explain why we think home prices are set to fall further.

By Leith van Onselen We are continually told by the development lobby and politicians that the solution to affordable housing is more supply – that we just need to build more dwellings and Sydney’s and Melbourne’s chronic housing woes will be rectified.

By Leith van Onselen With the release last week of Australia’s population data for the September quarter of 2017, it’s an opportunity time to once again examine how Australia’s dwelling supply is tracking against population growth.

Via UBS on the Banking Royal Commission: What could be the implications? Mortgage (and other consumer credit product) underwriting standards in Australia seem to have been lax for some period of time.

CoreLogic released its auction report yesterday, which reported a largely stable preliminary national auction clearance rate – i.e. 65.5% this week compared to 67.5% last week (later revised down to 66.0%).

As we know, the banks have something of “liar loan” problem.