Australian Property

From CoreLogic: Leading index for mortgages still down 10 points on last year and running at 2014 levels.

By Leith van Onselen Last week, I published an article entitled “Amid CBA scandal, real estate money laundering ignored”, which questioned why Australia’s biggest money laundering honeypot – Australian property – continues to be ignored by Australia’s politicians and the media.

Via the AFR: Chinese property buyers are turning away from Australian housing as efforts by regulators in both countries to slow investment begin to bite.

CoreLogic released its auction report yesterday, which reported a slight weakening in the preliminary national auction clearance rate to 70.5% from 71.5% last weekend, and was below the 75.0% recorded in the same weekend last year: Auction volumes nationally were 2,011 – above the 1,471 recorded in the same weekend last year.

By Leith van Onselen BIS Oxford Economics has forecast that the number of apartment commencements across Australia will fall below 60,000 by mid-2020, compared with around 119,000 in the March 2016 quarter.

By Leith van Onselen To be sure, the CBA money laundering scandal is a big deal.

By Leith van Onselen CoreLogic’s latest Pain & Gain report noted that more than one-third of Perth apartments sold at a loss in the March quarter of 2017: Now, property adviser and valuer, Rod Davidson, is predicting that the downturn could last for years.

Cross-posted from The Conversation: A new report by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) reveals, for the first time, the extent of housing need in Australia.

By Martin North, cross-posted from the Digital Finance Analytics Blog: Digital Finance Analytics has released the July results from our Household Finance Confidence Index, which shows a further fall, with momentum decaying.

CoreLogic released its auction report yesterday, which reported a slight firming in the national auction clearance rate to 71.5% from 70.7% last weekend, but was just below the 72.2% recorded in the same weekend last year: Auction volumes nationally were 1,846 – above the 1,540 recorded in the same weekend last year.

By Leith van Onselen CoreLogic has released its June 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.

By Leith van Onselen REA chief economist, Nerida Conisbee, has penned another self-serving article calling on governments to encourage the building of more apartment blocks to help ‘solve’ Australia’s housing affordability crisis.

By Leith van Onselen With the ABS yesterday releasing its dwelling approvals data for the June quarter, it’s an opportune time to once again examine how dwelling construction is tracking against population growth at the national and state and territory levels.