Australian Property

And not before time, via UBS on GMA: Balance of risk has tilted back to the negatives, in our view At the risk of positive news emerging in the 1Q17 update tomorrow, we’re downgrading our GMA rating to Sell.

Domainfax is torturing itself unnecessarily over house prices: The big question raised by last month’s slowdown in Sydney and Melbourne’s housing markets is whether this is a blip on the radar, or the start of something more significant.

By Leith van Onselen From SQM Research comes stock on market figures for the month of April, which reported a large 8.3% decline in listings over the month and an 11.9% fall over the year: Listings fell across all jurisdictions in April, Melbourne (-15.2%) and Sydney (-12.7%) recording particularly large declines.

Again from Martin North: Following the initial release yesterday, and the coverage in the AFR, today we drill down further into the latest mortgage stress results.

Sparkling journalism today at Flufferfax: ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott said talk of a housing bubble was simplistic, as the bank published figures showing more people were repaying their home loans on time than two years ago.

Via Bloomberg: Home Capital Group Inc. extended declines after the Canadian mortgage lender reported additional deposit withdrawals, prompting one of its biggest rivals to seek a C$2 billion ($1.5 billion) credit line to stem any contagion across the country’s financial markets.

By Leith van Onselen A vacant homes tax looks certain to be included in the upcoming Federal Budget.

From Martin North: Digital Finance Analytics has released new mortgage stress and default modelling for Australian mortgage borrowers, to end April 2017.  Across the nation, more than 767,000 households are now in mortgage stress (last month 669,000) with 32,000 of these in severe stress.

From Moody’s today: Moody’s Investors Service says that delinquencies for Australian auto loan asset-backed securities (ABS) fell in February 2017 from January 2017, while prime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) rose.

From CoreLogic, the leading mortgage index sank again last week to roughly 121 versus 135 the same week last year: This is now a year on year correction of approximately the same magnitude as that that befell the index after the first round of macroprudential.

Some intense millennial bashing from The Australian’s Grace Collier over the weekend: Deary me, houses are expensive, are they?

CoreLogic released its auction report yesterday, which revealed another weekend of strong auction conditions, with the national auction clearance rate rising to 76.9% from 72.1% last weekend, well above the 69.4% recorded in the same weekend last year: However, auction volumes nationally (2,347) were below the same weekend last year (2,675).

McGrathmageddon is apparently unbelievable to ASX regulators: And more new lows as the firm steadily implodes, both intraday and closing: What’s so unbelievable about it?