Australian Property

By Leith van Onselen From CoreLogic’s latest Pain & Gain report comes news that 13.3% of apartments transacted across Australia in the March quarter sold at a loss: As shown above, New South Wales was the outlier, with every other apartment market in the mainland recording double-digit resale losses.

The rarely useful Elizabeth Knight put her finger on something over the weekend: There is a hidden and worrying risk lurking for a particular set of mortgage borrowers, whose level of financial stress is about to get a whole lot worse.

CoreLogic released its auction report yesterday, which revealed a further softening in the national auction clearance rate to 69.1% from 69.6% last weekend, but was still above the 64.4% recorded in the same weekend last year: Auction volumes nationally were 2,323 – above the 2,218 recorded in the same weekend last year.

Cross-posted from The Conversation: Does the Australian government have the policy, organisational and conceptual capacity to handle the country’s A$6 trillion housing stock?

Citi went shopping:  Channel checks indicate apartment rebates have moved to >10%.

Via AFR: The days of Chinese companies bidding up asset prices in Australia appear to be numbered, after the banking regulator in Beijing ordered a review of the sector’s exposure to the most acquisitive private firms.

Remember Mr IQ A.K.A Nathan Birch?

By Leith van Onselen With the release this week of the ABS residential property price data for the March quarter, it is an opportune time to once again plot house prices against total finance commitments (excluding refinancings) as also measured by the ABS.

By Leith van Onselen Retired economics professor, Peter Abelson, is the latest to call for stamp duties to be replaced by land taxes, arguing that such a reform could assist housing affordability.

By Leith van Onselen John Warhurst, an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University, has penned a well-argued piece calling for a Royal Commission into political corruption.

Domainfax & Co are desperately fighting to keep the permanently high plateau for house prices alive today: The housing boom on Australia’s east coast will be over in two years but a crash like the US subprime crisis in 2007 is not likely, research and forecast group BIS Oxford Economics says.

Via Huffpost: The slowdown in Greater Toronto’s housing market this spring appears to be more than a one-month blip.

Please explain: Senator Hanson has called for limits to foreign non-resident home ownership in Australia and will be raising the issue today, on the floor of the Senate.

By Leith van Onselen The NSW Government’s fake concern over the dire state of Sydney housing affordability continued yesterday with the release of the State Budget, which included more token measures to boost supply.

By Leith van Onselen The ABS yesterday released its property price data for the March quarter, which valued Australia’s dwelling stock owned by households at a record $6.27 trillion dollars.

By Leith van Onselen SQM Research has released its rental vacancy series for May, which revealed a 0.2% fall in the national vacancy rate over the month as well as a 0.2% fall over the year: As shown above, rental vacancies fell across almost all capitals in May.

This is turning into a smash: Effective on 30 June 2017, Westpac will reduce its variable rate interest rates for customers paying principal and interest on their owner occupier home loans by 8 basis points to 5.24% per annum (comparison rate 5.38% per annum*).

Via S&P: The number of delinquent housing loans underlying Australian prime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) increased to 1.21% in April from 1.16% a month earlier, according to a recent report by S&P Global Ratings.