Australian Property

CoreLogic has released its final auction results for last weekend, with the clearance rate nationally rising to its highest level since mid-March 2022 before the RBA began hiking interest rates: 68.1% of auctions returned successful result last weekend, up from 62.4% in the same weekend last year.

Deloitte’s Weekly Economics Briefing reports that “renters are increasingly being squeezed by higher rents, with little respite in sight”.

Earlier this week, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles posted the below on Facebook claiming that Labor’s record immigration policy is not driving Australia’s rental crisis: “Immigration.

Brisbane experienced the nation’s biggest house price boom over the pandemic, with values soaring 45.3% between end-February 2020 and end-June 2022 according to CoreLogic: Brisbane home values subsequently fell by 10.7% between July and February before staging a modest rebound in March, which has continued this month.

I noted last week how property investors were coming under increasing financial strain following the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) 3.50% increase in official interest rates.

Australia’s rental market is clearly in crisis.

Daniel Ho, co-founder and group managing director of Chinese real estate portal Juwai IQI, recently claimed that for the first time, Australia is the most popular country for Chinese homebuyers as measured by enquiries made on the site since the beginning of last year.

According to experts cited in The AFR, a lack of investors is partly to blame for Australia’s rental crisis, while investors already in the market are struggling to hold onto their rental properties because of soaring mortgage costs.

Peter Martin has long been a rabid supporter of the ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration policy (for example, see here, here, here, and here).

On Wednesday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released dwelling construction data for the December quarter, which showed that construction volumes are crashing in the face of soaring material costs and 3.5% of interest rate hikes from the RBA.

In 2006, Australia and the global Financial Action Taskforce (FATF) agreed to establish “tranche 2” anti-money laundering (AML) laws targeting non-financial assets (in particular property).

Key property data analysts including CoreLogic, SQM Research and Proptrack believe Australia’s housing downturn is over.

Across Australia, company failures increased by 23% in March, led by the construction industry.

Newly elected NSW Premier Chris Minns has pretended to care about the rental crisis across the state, appointing a rental commissioner to help rebalance the housing market for tenants.

SQM Research has released rental vacancy data for March, with the national vacancy rate easing marginally to 1.1% from 1.0% in February: The slight easing was driven by the regions “as a sign of a population flow reversal back to the cities”.

In its submission to Treasury’s employment white paper, the Housing Industry Association (HIA)warned the federal government that just 185,000 homes are expected to be built annually in 2024 and 2025.

On Thursday night, I was interviewed by Andrew Bolt where we discussed Australia’s rental crisis, which is certain to get much worse due to: the Albanese Government’s record-breaking immigration policy; and widespread building company failures, which will stymie housing supply over the foreseeable future.

It always makes sense until it doesn’t.