Australia Property
Perth tenants on top as WA rental vacancy rate hits 20-year high
http://www.perthnow.com.au/realestate/ne...7524083658 sent from my Galaxy Tab S
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17-09-2015, 11:07 AM
(17-09-2015, 10:34 AM)BlueKelah Wrote: Perth tenants on top as WA rental vacancy rate hits 20-year high http://www.valuebuddies.com/thread-5870-...#pid115402 almost a month late mate...
17-09-2015, 12:56 PM
(17-09-2015, 11:07 AM)greengiraffe Wrote:(17-09-2015, 10:34 AM)BlueKelah Wrote: Perth tenants on top as WA rental vacancy rate hits 20-year high In case you did not read the article, this article has some detailed info with some real figures on rents.. And is more on rents rather than property prices so wouldn't it consider it late but rather extra additional information. From the article : TOP 10 SUBURBS FOR RENTAL DISCOUNTS (HOUSES) 1. Claremont: From $1100 to $768. Down 30 per cent or $332. 2. Peppermint Grove: From $2000 to $1525. Down 24 per cent or $475. 3. Burswood: From $800 to $613. Down 23 per cent or $187. 4. Waterford: From $750 to $595. Down -21 per cent or $155. 5. Churchlands: From $1100 to $900. Down 18 per cent or $200. 6. City Beach: From $1145 to $950. Down 17 per cent or $245. 7. Burns Beach: From $800 to $665. Down 17 per cent or $135. 8. Ascot: From $600 to $500. Down 17 per cent or $100. 9. Menora: From $700 to $585. Down 16 per cent or $115. 10. Shoalwater: From $430 to $360. Down 16 per cent or $70. TOP TEN SUBURBS FOR RENTAL DISCOUNTS (UNITS): 1. North Coogee: From $850 to $425. Down 50 per cent or $425. 2. Cloverdale: From $530 to $450. Down 15 per cent or $80. 3. Mount Hawthorn: From $550 to $445. Down 14 per cent or $75. 4. Connolly: From $517 to $445. Down 14 per cent or $72. 5. Crawley: From $490 to $420. Down 14 per cent or $70. 6. Sorrento: From $565 to $500. Down 13 per cent or $65. 7. Highgate: From $480 to $420. Down 13 per cent or $60. 8. North Fremantle: From $725 to $640. Down 12 per cent or $65. 9. Doubleview: From $450 to $400. Down 11 per cent or $50. 10. Perth: From $590 to $525. Down 11 per cent or $65. Around half of the suburbs above can be considered blue chip suburbs in Perth. Generally it does look like a more than 10% drop across all property types with house rents dropping much more than units in % terms. Could we be seeing the same type of drop in rental yield and property prices across the other Capital cities soon?
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17-09-2015, 01:30 PM
(17-09-2015, 12:56 PM)BlueKelah Wrote:(17-09-2015, 11:07 AM)greengiraffe Wrote:(17-09-2015, 10:34 AM)BlueKelah Wrote: Perth tenants on top as WA rental vacancy rate hits 20-year high slowly wait lah... hardworking classes that doesn't own needs a break from sky-rocketing rentals... its part of a correction. IIRC, over the last decade, rentals have gone up easily between 80 - 100% from bottom to peak before this correction. No worries lah unless you are geared to your eye-balls
17-09-2015, 03:54 PM
Mining towns face mortgage threat
Michael Roddan [Image: michael_roddan.png] Reporter [b]Australian regions suffering from the resources downturn are seeing increased mortgage delinquency rates as more residents of once-booming mining town fail to repay loans.[/b] Global ratings agency Moody’s said today that, excluding the New South Wales hot property market, mortgage delinquencies across Australia increased over the year through to May, despite two Reserve Bank interest rate cuts putting borrowing costs at their lowest level on record. NSW is undergoing a property boom, with home prices in Sydney growing 17 per cent over the last year, according to the latest figures from RP data, while the state is also seeing a “significant” decrease in mortgage delinquencies, which have fallen 0.29 percentage points over the year through May. Excluding NSW, the rest of the country has seen the delinquency rate increase to 1.5 per cent from 1.42 per cent a year ago. Moody’s assistant vice president Alena Chen says the trend may only get worse. “If the pace of house price growth slows in Sydney — or other areas where the property market has been performing strongly — we would expect mortgage delinquencies to increase over the long term,” Ms Chen said. Commodity prices have recently plunged to their lowest point in more than a decade, causing mining companies to cut back spending and shutter mines and sparking a downturn across regional towns dependent on the resources sector. The three regions that recorded the biggest delinquency increases were Fitzroy, located in Queensland close to the Bowen Basin coal mining region, as well as the Darling Downs-Maranoa area in southern Queensland, and Mandurah in Western Australia, which are also exposed to the mining industry. Mortgage delinquencies for Australia, including NSW, declined marginally to 1.34 per cent down from 1.38 per cent a year earlier, Moody’s said. “The improvement in Australia-wide delinquencies was largely driven by a significant decline — 0.29 percentage points — in delinquencies in NSW, reflecting the state’s relatively strong economic activity and rapidly rising property prices in Sydney,” Ms Chen said. Moody’s said Sydney and New South Wales dominated the list of best performing regions as well as those most-improved. While the 10 worst performing regions in Australia were largely concentrated in Western Australia and Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia were the worst-performing states, Moody’s said, with delinquency rates of 1.85 per cent and 1.64 per cent respectively. South Australia currently has the highest unemployment rate in the country, at 7.7 per cent. It also had the largest decline in average weekly earnings over the year to May, falling 3.85 per cent. The best performing suburbs in Australia were Barangaroo, Bondi and Lane Cove in Sydney.
17-09-2015, 03:59 PM
An omen for Australian house prices
Callam Pickering [Image: callam_pickering.png] Economics Editor, Business Spectator. Melbourne [b]A shift in the fundamental driver of long-run property price growth may lead to downside risk over the next decade, a new research paper from the Reserve Bank suggests.[/b] The paper, by Mario Kohler and Michelle van der Merwe, explores in some detail the factors that drives house price growth in the long-term. In particular, the paper looks at whether that growth reflects rising household debt or inadequate housing supply. The fundamental driver has shifted over time, with the sharp rise in dwelling prices during the 1990s and early 2000s reflecting a significant increase in the debt-to-income ratio of Australian households. More recently, strong population growth has effectively propped up the property sector, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. Nominal dwelling prices have grown on average by 7.25 per cent per year over the past three decades. During the 1990s this growth mainly reflected inflation, while gains during the 1990s and early 2000s were significantly higher after adjusting for inflation. The past decade has been characterised by growth that has been broadly in line with household income growth. This relationship has broken down recently, with the house price-to-income ratio surging to a record high after the RBA cut rates to the lowest level in history. In determining the drivers of long-run house prices, the authors have had to delve into the murky world of house price modelling. Their purpose is to examine “the extent to which changes or trends in such fundamental drivers correlate with observed changes in longer-run housing price growth”. This isn’t an assessment of whether housing is priced appropriately or whether housing is affordable. That is a separate question and beyond the scope of this paper. According to economic theory, the price of any asset is a product of the demand and supply for that asset. Both dynamics are relatively complex in the property market. In the short run, “the demand for housing can change more quickly than the supply of housing”. The supply response usually takes more time, reflecting the lag between when investment decisions are made and when construction is complete, which often results in prices overshooting in both directions. In the long term, supply can adjust to a shift in conditions but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the supply response will be adequate. That is particularly pertinent to a country such as Australia where supply is artificially reduced by state government policy. The large divergence between the price of housing and the cost of building a new dwelling indicate the market is at least partly determined by factors external to housing supply, such as financial deregulation. The deregulation of the financial sector during the 1980s, combined with the shift towards lower inflation and interest rates, increased the access to finance for many Australian households. The ability of households to service their new or existing mortgage improved significantly during this period prompting households to borrow increasing amounts as the housing market spiralled upwards. This whole process was supercharged in 1999 when the Howard government introduced the capital gains tax discount. This process was structural in nature and boosted price growth over a 15-year period. This adjustment appears to have run its course, with the household debt-to-income ratio relatively stable over the past decade. Beyond financial deregulation, the most likely source of house price appreciation is a failure of housing supply to keep up with underlying demand. According to the authors, underlying demand is effectively “the longer-run level of demand, abstracting from shorter-term influences on housing demand related to the business cycle”. Underlying demand, which consists of “demand from newly formed households; demand for new dwellings to replace demolished ones; and demand for second or vacant homes”, is largely unobservable. We can try to estimate it, but there is no way to tell for sure whether those estimates are correct. This is a problem that many property analysts have had to deal with over the years. Underlying demand was relatively modest throughout the 1990s due to a combination of subdued population growth. This offset the ongoing decline in average household size. Underlying demand ramped up over the past decade as Australia’s population growth rose to be among the highest in the OECD. Realistically we can expect underlying demand to moderate somewhat over the next few years as population growth returns towards a level that is considered more normal. Putting the pieces together, it appears the number of dwelling completions was near the lower band of estimates for underlying demand. The recent construction boom should see between 180,000 and 190,000 new private dwellings added to the housing stock during the 2014-15 financial year. The figures can differ significantly by state. It probably won’t surprise readers to know the gap between underlying demand and supply in New South Wales has been quite large for much of the past decade. That gap is slowly beginning to close but the demand/supply dynamics will likely provide some support to prices in the near term. The authors take their analysis one step further by attributing growth in each financial year to its fundamental driver: rising debt or the demand and supply gap. This modelling clearly shows that financial deregulation was the main driver during the 1990s and early 2000s, while inadequate supply has helped to support price growth over the past decade. These figures may point towards some downside risk to the housing market over the next decade. The household debt channel is largely exhausted — even the Reserve Bank believes that a further rise would be undesirable — while estimates of population growth are unlikely to return towards their earlier peak. Relatively weak income growth — resulting from the decline in Australia’s terms of trade — also suggest that future price growth won’t replicate the growth that we have become accustomed to over the past few decades.
17-09-2015, 08:28 PM
NaN of [img=620x0]http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/j/f/a/r/0/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gjoupv.png/1442481469885.jpg[/img]Offshore funds account for as much as 70 per cent of apartment construction in the Melbourne CBD, but this capital, and underlying demand, is unlikely to be affected by changes to SIV investment rules, developers say.Josh Robenstone [Image: 1426320577108.png]
by Michael Bleby A fall in applications for visas that offer wealthy individuals – many from China – a route to permanent residency if they invest $5 million will have little impact on the demand for the apartments that are driving the housing construction boom, developers say. Applications for the Special Investor visa class have fallen since the start of July, when curbs limiting investment on residential property came into effect. In the first six months of this year, Australia received 1108 applications for the visas – an average of 185 a month. The total since the start of July is just nine, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection said. Demand from overseas investors, particularly from China, has powered the apartment-led construction boom, so there are concerns the new visa curbs and tighter controls on exporting currency from China could hit demand. Australia's four largest banks account for only 30 per cent of all apartment developments in the Melbourne CBD. Developers deny there has been any effect. "We're not seeing any impact of SIVs in our customer base," said John Carfi, developer Mirvac's head of residential. "They don't feature." Wealthy individuals are buying houses in expensive suburbs like Melbourne's Toorak and Sydney's Point Piper, rather than off-the-plan apartments, Mr Carfi said. Developer Aqualand's general manager, Wayne Xiong, said curbs to Canada's now-closed similar visa program had not dented Chinese investment in apartments. "When they cut their SIV program, total investments didn't drop," Mr Xiong said. "Currency and immigration factors continue to dominate Chinese investments. If you cut all immigration, then that might affect apartment investments." The new rules are having an effect on sentiment. Grace Xie, a Melbourne-based immigration agent on a Victorian government-led SIV promotional tour, said this week there was still interest in the visa, but it was tempered by a wariness about the new rules. "It's not as strong as before, but not bad," she said. Applications for the visas require state government sponsorship to make their application to federal authorities. Under the old rules, Victoria was getting an average 30 to 40 applications a month. This spiked to more than 50 in the run-up to the rule changes, a spokeswoman said. Since July, however, the state government has nominated just 22. The rise before July was a reflection of the rush to get in ahead of the well-telegraphed changes. From July to December 2014, there were 436 SIV primary applications, less than half the number in the first six months of this year, the Immigration Department said. Part of the slowdown reflects the hangover following that rush, and the numbers to date cannot be regarded as a reliable indication, said David Chin, the managing director of financial services consultancy Basis Point. "It's not a true reflection of market demand." With reporting by Su-Lin Tan
19-09-2015, 08:09 AM
Chinese crackdown could threaten Australian property market
Andrew Main [Image: andrew_main.png] Senior Business Reporter Sydney [Image: 920972-61413902-5dce-11e5-896e-4e71406d3561.jpg] Hamish Douglass, CEO of Magellan, says up to $US500bn of mainly private capital has left China in the past 12 months. Picture: James Croucher Source: News Corp Australia [b]One of the biggest risks to the Australian property market is a potential crackdown by the Chinese central bank on its citizens exporting capital to invest in other countries, says Hamish Douglass.[/b] Mr Douglass, the chief executive and chief investment officer of the Magellan group, said this week that between $US450 billion and $US500bn of mainly private capital had left China in the past 12 months thanks to “very leaky’’ export controls, and the People’s Bank of China now wants to see capital flowing back to where it came from. “Of this capital that’s been leaving, tens of billions of dollars has been finding its way into the Australian property market and for us that’s acted as a form of stimulus as our commodity markets slowed down. It’s breathtaking and it simply wouldn’t have happened without this capital that’s been flying out of China. “It’s not only Australia — there have been other countries — but ultimately the more of our property capital stock that gets into the hands of a foreign constituency, the more correlation our property market ultimately experiences to either the policy implications which make up the country, or the investment desires or whims of that class of investor. “From a policy point of view, capital leaving China is actually sucking dollars out of their economy and their economy’s slowing down, so you could see, legitimately, that the People’s Bank of China may want to slow the rate of capital outflow because it’s draining financial resources.” He said that there was a legal limit of $US50,000 ($69,000) a year per person leaving China, “which makes it interesting to work out how they finance a $20 million purchase in Point Piper”, and “if the PBoC really clamped down on that, property investment would stop immediately and the price of apartments, many of which are specifically designed for the Chinese market, could drop by as much as 50 per cent’’. Mr Douglass served a five-year term on the Foreign Investment Review Board between 2009 and 2014. He explained that “as soon as the buyer signs a contract to buy an apartment it becomes existing housing stock, whose only legal buyer has to be an Australian resident”. “At that point the Chinese can’t sell to themselves; they’ll have to sell to Australians. And do Australians really want to buy residential property in CBDs on this scale? Under our foreign investment rules they’re the only ones who can buy it from the Chinese. And in that circumstance the price might be going down and the buyer will want a bargain. “We’re talking Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Parramatta ... you only have to look around the skylines. Many of the buyers may be viewing it as an alternative to a bank deposit but if that investor suddenly feels that there’s risk involved and it’s not a bank deposit, they want to sell and they see prices moving, the herd changes direction and that can compound the problem.’’ He admitted that much of the Chinese property investment in Australia was financed offshore or indeed paid for in full by the buyer, and that Australian banks had “very significantly” cut back on lending to finance new apartments in CBDs. “But I can guarantee to you that if we get a 50 per cent drop in the prices of apartments, there will be a drop in the value of bank shares. Even though Australians prefer houses to apartments, any drop in one sector of the market is going to spill over into the other sectors because of relative valuations.’’ He said not all capital was going into housing. “There’s some capital leaving for development needs and corporate M&A, but largely it’s private capital leaving China.’’ On the $US50,000-a-year limit, “all you need to do is have 100 relatives and actually pay them renminbi in China and take the money out yourself’’, he said. “Or you go to a third party intermediary who puts in a fake invoice for purchases offshore for import reasons. “This is where corruption comes in. And lo and behold, the banks are processing a lot of legitimate capital needs which are actually illegitimate.’’ He said that the PBoC’s slight devaluation of the yuan on August 11, “and it was only slight”, was a “brilliant” move because it made capital exports more difficult at a time when those suddenly more valuable overseas currencies were easier to tempt back into China. He made it clear he doesn’t expect any looming bust in China, despite the slowdown and more than 22 million apartments lying empty, “because the Chinese government is in the strongest financial position of any country in the world and the government still owns 40 per cent of the economy. “Post August 11 the PBoC has brought back into China more money than ever before, at a better rate,’’ he said. “One way for our government to reduce the risk of a bust in the apartment market would be to allow overseas buyers to purchase housing stock owned by overseas buyers, but that would be a politically charged decision given the sensitivities around foreign ownership of housing.” “We’ve been in a perfect positive cycle and the problem is that when you start moving you get into a vicious cycle going in the other direction.’ “We’ve now been 21 years without a recession and a recession is caused by a drop in the property market. “The global financial crisis could have caused it to happen in 2008 and 2009 but China saved us through their investment expansion, which led to a continued boom in our commodity markets.’’
19-09-2015, 08:55 AM
NaN of [img=620x0]http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/j/l/3/q/w/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gjp6nx.png/1442528796712.jpg[/img]Far more worryingly – from the Reserve Bank's point of view – is a long-run increase in population rates that potentially fails to trigger an increase in the supply of housing. Meredith O'Shea [Image: 1425257720877.png]
by Jacob Greber The Reserve Bank of Australia has downplayed warnings that ultra-low official interest rates are stoking unsustainable house price increases. Instead, they suggest a failure to supply new homes to a rapidly rising population is a bigger factor. In research that will add fuel to a raging debate about whether the Reserve Bank has pushed interest rates too low – and by definition created a housing bubble – the central bank predicts households are unlikely to keep driving prices skywards by borrowing more. Unlike the 15 years leading up to the mid-2000s, households are not increasing their debt-to-income ratios in any meaningful way. "Looking ahead, it seems unlikely that there will be a return to the rather extreme conditions of the earlier episode when significant increases in household debt supported high housing price growth," researchers at the bank said in the quarterly bulletin published on Thursday. Far more worryingly – from the Reserve Bank's point of view – is a long-run increase in population rates that potentially fails to trigger an increase in the supply of housing. High population growth and a lack of supply could lead to "periods of sizeable changes in housing price growth," wrote Marion Kohler and Michelle van der Merwe, the two officials at the central bank who did the work. NEW HOME CONSTRUCTION Crucially they argue that even if lower mortgage rates spur buyers into the property market sooner than they otherwise would, an inevitable surge in new home construction will ultimately cool price gains. "In the long run, even if mortgage rates were to remain low for an extended period of time, there should be a supply response to help move the market back into its longer-run equilibrium," the researchers said. "Indeed, the reduction in real mortgage rates since 2011 – following reductions in the cash rate – has been closely associated with both stronger housing price growth and strong dwelling construction more recently." The findings are supported by preliminary recent evidence across the property market, where price gains appear to have slowed, construction has surged and auction rates are declining. THREE DECADES OF DATA Over the past three decades, house prices have increased on average by 7.25 per cent a year, and by around 7 per cent since the early 1990s. In the 1980s, the RBA found annual house price inflation ran at close to 10 per cent – as did inflation more generally, making price gains in real terms relatively modest at 1.4 per cent a year. During the 1990s to the mid-2000s, prices far more strongly at 7.2 per cent a year on average in nominal terms and 4.5 per cent after inflation. Over the past decade annual nominal prices rose at a little over 5 per cent and 2.5 per cent in real terms. The research attempts to explain the differences between price changes across those three periods. "During the 1980s, housing price inflation broadly followed general price inflation in the economy, which was relatively high and volatile," Kohler and Van der Merwe said. In the subsequent period – following financial deregulation in the mid-1980s and disinflation of the early 1990s, cheaper and easier access to credit supported a structural rise in how much households were prepared to borrow for homes. That helped spur the high pace of property inflation through to the mid-2000s, they suggest. Since then, over the past decade, debt-to-income levels have stabilised while population growth driven by strong immigration and the trend towards smaller household sizes have seen underlying demand exceed the supply of new homes, the research argues. "One important factor for housing price growth is the ability of the supply of new dwellings to respond to changes in demand," the authors said. "The significant of this is made clear by the recent increases in higher-density housing and lower growth of those prices relative to prices of detached houses, whose supply has been less responsive."
22-09-2015, 04:20 PM
Correction is overdue... crash unlikely IMHO
Capital city home prices surge over $600,000
Michael Roddan [Image: michael_roddan.png] Reporter [b]The average price for a home in one of Australia’s capital cities has jumped above $600,000, after prices surged nearly 10 per cent across the board over the last year.[/b] Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows residential property prices in Australia’s eight capital cities rose by 4.7 per cent over the three months to the end of June, taking the surge in home prices in the 12-month period to 9.8 per cent The rapid increase took the price of the average residential dwelling to $604,700, rising by an average of more than $26,000 in the June quarter. Sydney led the charge, with property prices ballooning 8.9 per cent in the June quarter, taking the year through June price growth to 18.9 per cent. Melbourne’s booming property market was close behind, with home price growth of 4.2 per cent in the latest quarter for an annual rise of 7.8 per cent. Record-low official interest rates have raised concerns of a speculative property bubble in Sydney and Melbourne, prompting a banking regulator crackdown on investment lending and loose credit requirements. Outside Melbourne and Sydney however, property price increases were relatively subdued. No other capital city posted house price growth above 1 per cent in the quarter or more than 3 per cent over the year. House prices retreated in Perth, decreasing by 0.9 per cent in the June quarter, adding to a 1.2 per cent fall over the year. Darwin house prices declined 0.8 per cent in the three months to June and by 1.8 per cent over the year. Perth and Darwin house prices are reflecting softening demand for property as the tail-end of the mining investment boom weighs on competition for homes. The total value of Australian homes hit $5.76 trillion at the end of June, rising $272 billion over the three month period. The number of dwellings increased by 38,400 to 9,528,300 homes in the same period. |
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