Australian Property

By Leith van Onselen Evidence continues to mount that Sydney’s housing boom is done.

By Martin North, cross-posted from the Digital Finance Analytics Blog: The latest BIS data series on home prices trends has been published to Q2 2017.

By Leith van Onselen Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Philip Lowe says there are certain cities whose house prices increase a lot more than other cities in their countries.

Via AFR: Westpac Group will this weekend upgrade its key measures for assessing property borrowers’ capacity to service their debt, amid intense pressure from regulators to provide better insights into households’ financial commitments and vulnerability to financial stress.

I know Rob Burgess is a Lefty.

Good job, Morry: Melbourne’s high-profile Schwartz family – powerful players in development, finance and publishing – have sold at the top of the market, divesting a prime Melbourne CBD portfolio for close to $100 million.

The AFR would have you think so: Even John McGrath was concerned that Sydney was too hot.

By Leith van Onselen The property lobby has been quick to oppose the SA Government’s announced stamp duty surcharge on foreign buyers.

By Leith van Onselen CoreLogic has released its September 2017 Mapping the Market Report, which examines how the cost of housing has shifted across Australia’s capital cities by suburbs over the past five years to June 2017.

Suck it up, Gottiboff.

From Gottiboff today: It’s conventional to blame APRA and the regulators’ new rules but the credit squeeze motivation goes deeper and I think it is multiplied by a middle management confidence loss stemming from the looming retrenchments, the scandals and now building up to the real possibility of a Royal Commission.

By Leith van Onselen Late last month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released its 2016-17 Australian System of National Accounts (ASNA) release, which provided a detailed presentation of annual national accounts data.

From the RBA yesterday: Thank you for the opportunity to speak at this event.

Property tragic Dick Wakelin has some advice for you today: So let’s have a reality check.

CoreLogic’s leading mortgage index is going precisely nowhere: Not so listings, now at four year highs… The Sydney auction bust is clearly spreading inwards and Melbourne’s outwards: With no circuit breaker on the horizon – the opposite in fact – what’s to stop the price falls?

By Leith van Onselen Back in 2010, the CBA produced the below slide claiming that part of the reason why Australian housing is so expensive is because we have the biggest homes in the world: HSBC’s Paul Bloxham has previously made similar arguments: …the quality of the housing stock is high.

Via The Australian: The wave of new apartments flooding the Brisbane market has spawned property tours in which bargain hunters are bussed to newly built projects where defaults — largely by Chinese buyers — have led to units being put back on the market at deep discounts.

Following yesterday’s Domain float, it’s a more than fair question given the prima facie similarities between the business models.

By Leith van Onselen Evidence continues to mount that Sydney’s housing boom is cooked.

By Leith van Onselen As part of its June State Budget, South Australia announced that it would levy an additional 4% stamp duty on foreign property buyers and temporary residents, starting from 1 January 2018.