Australian Property

By Leith van Onselen Here we go again.

From Moody’s Moody’s Investors Service says that delinquencies for Australian auto loan asset-backed securities (ABS) and prime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) increased in April 2017 from March 2017.

Via Macquarie: We estimate that out-of-cycle interest rate hikes announced over the last 12 months reduced overall households’ incomes by ~$5bn.

Get ready for some serious congestion in property sales: Sellers of property worth $750,000 or more could face a 12.5 per cent tax on the proceeds under new ATO rules introduced to stop foreign property owners avoiding capital gains tax.

CoreLogic released its auction report yesterday, which reported a rebound in the national auction clearance rate to 70.3% from 69.1% last weekend, still above the 67.0% recorded in the same weekend last year: Auction volumes nationally were 1,984 – way above the 841 recorded in the same weekend last year.

From Australian Broker: ME today announced several changes across its home loan portfolio.

US non-bank lender SoFi is onto it for Millennials: Who says you can’t have avocado toast if you want to buy a home?

Weeoo, weeoo, weeoo.

By Leith van Onselen With the ABS yesterday releasing its population data for the December quarter (taking into account the results of the 2016 Census), 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.

By Leith van Onselen Eliza Owen, commercial research analyst at CoreLogic, has penned an interesting article in The Australian on the significant rise in group housing reported in the latest Census: The 2016 census data reveals how people are dealing with unaffordable housing in the capital cities: a rapid increase in group households.

Recall recently from property magnate Tim Gurner: “It’s an incredibly challenging time in the market, no question.

By Leith van Onselen LF Economics has released another interesting report entitled “The Australian Phantom Housing Shortage: The Myth in Every Bubble”, which challenges the oft-used claim that Australia has a chronic housing shortage.

From Deutsche: Repricing of interest-only mortgages In recent weeks the majors have announced repricing initiatives targeted at interest-only (IO) mortgages. While they raised IO rates by 30-35bps, owneroccupier principal & interest (P&I) rates were reduced by 3-8bps.