No ‘Renewed Boom’ For Sydney Housing: Economist
The Sydney Morning Herald has an editorial on Australias housing bubble. “Evidence is mounting that the slump in the housing market has ended, with house prices rising, auction clearance rates increasing and rental vacancy rates falling. Is that what you’re starting to think? It’s certainly what your friendly real estate agent and the property developers would like you to think.”
“But I doubt it. So does Kieran Davies, chief economist for ABN Amro. Mr Davies is sceptical that the rise signals a renewed boom because simple valuation measures indicate the housing market’s still extremely expensive, despite prices having gone sideways to down for most of the past two years.”‘
“For example, if you compare median house prices with average weekly earnings, you find that the average price for the capital cities remains close to the all-time high reached in 2003. It’s 9.5 times annual income, down from a peak of 10 times and still well above the historical average of 6.5 times.”
“Or take the gross rental yield - the rental income (before allowing for expenses) expressed as a percentage of the market value of the home. It’s off its multi-decade low of 2.7 per cent, but it’s only back up to 2.9 per cent, compared with its long-term average of just over 4 per cent.”
“Given that there has been so little change in valuations in the past two years, we are interpreting the recent rise in house prices as volatility in the data rather than a sign that the housing market is reinflating,’ Mr Davies says.”
“What’s more, since prices remain so far out of line with wages and rents, he continues to expect a long period in which prices are on a flat-to-down trend until they achieve the usual decline in real prices seen in the aftermath of a house price bubble.”
“It’s still taking a long time to sell a home. In Sydney and two other major capitals, it now takes about 100 days to sell, up from about 40 days at the height of the boom. And home owners still have to discount the advertised price to achieve a sale, with the discount averaging 7.5 per cent.”
“The increase in real rents nationally seems mostly due to the booming housing market in Perth, where both rents and house prices are rising at an extraordinary rate. And Mr Davies suspects the Perth boom will peter out later this year. At present, Perth is building as many houses as Sydney, even though there are three times more households in Sydney. So it’s hard to see that national demand for rental housing is so great as to almost completely soak up this supply.”
“No, the signs of the property market starting to recover don’t really stack up. The recovery will happen one day, of course, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath.”
Here’s a similar report:
‘Recent signs in real estate have led to renewed optimism that the Australian housing market has turned the corner, and the glory days may be coming back. AMP Capital points out some harsh realities. AMP Capital believes the market is still overvalued. House prices need to fall by about 29% to bring the ratio of house prices to rents back to its long-term average, reports AMP Capital, and house prices need to fall by about 18% for the ratio of house prices to wages to return to more normal levels. It is not surprising, on these figures, that the OECD has found Australia to have the most overvalued housing in the group. In the short term, AMP believes Australia has to ‘work off’ the excesses of the recent housing bubble. This could last several years. In the mean time, low yields on rentals continue to make property unattractive for investors, AMP Capital suggests.’
Possible suckers rally?
Rates going up, inventory up so things don’t look to great for home prices here in the great USA.
Down here in arizona It reminds me of an old western showdown on the streests of tombstone. Which one will draw first, buyer or seller.
“Do you come from the land down under”, men at work,another great tune from 80’s
DCB?
10-Yr Bond 4.72%
It got around this point twice in the last 52 weeks and fell. However, it is on a nice support path, so it should break through.
strange …
the Economist did a lot of work regarding ‘overvaluation’ and the Dutch market (plus a few others) are as overvalued as the market in Oz - or maybe even more after the recent declines in Oz.
But Dutch RE prices have been gaining steam again last year (+6% nationally, +20% in my area) and the same ABN Amro bank expects Dutch homeprices to rise by 100% in the next 10 years (which would bring the total gains for the Netherlands at +1000-2000% in 25 years).
so much for analist expectations …
One explanation could be the severely restricted rental market in the Netherlands (government is trying very hard to push up rental prices to make house prices seem less elevated).
“(government is trying very hard to push up rental prices to make house prices seem less elevated).”
Whaaa? I’m no economist so please explain to me how government manipulation in raising rents is going to solve the problem or make things better. If housing is widely overvalued, bringing up the cost of renting one seems like it would solve nothing except make that more unaffordable. Let’s just make everything more expensive. “Hey, housing prices aren’t really that bad. Everything costs more these days. I just spent $42.00 on a gallon of milk.”
there is hardly any ‘free’ rental market left in the Netherlands.
75% of people who rent get huge subsidies (many are on welfare or similar state income) and in most areas it takes many years on a waiting list to get into a rental property. If you have no fixed income or some kind of ‘disadvantaged’ status it is very hard to get in. And of course the people who are ‘in’ have no incentive to move.
You are right, making everything more expensive does not help but this is pretty serious stuff for politicians, they LOVE it. Now we need even more housing subsidies and more special incentives for starters, young families, elderly people on small pensions etc. etc. The RE mob loves it just as well and that is why the housing minister loves jacking up rents (she is a former project developer and I have no doubt that she will be back in her old job after doing a great job for her peers in the government).
Making rents unaffordable for almost everyone is the best way to keep the seriously overvalued Dutch housing market afloat a little longer.
wow, that’s really scary when the people who have a vested interest in keeping housing prices appreciating despite disconnect from ‘fundamentals’ can just change the fundamentals (well, even more than some might argue policy people in the US for instance can!).
There is something of this kind of effect in ‘collegetowns’ like ann arbor. When the Uni raises ‘costs’ it includes “room” too, so if the students have to pay 600bucks a month to park their bottoms in a bed at night, that comes to be figured into rental rates thru much of the near-campus area and even beyond. That’s a cost the parents pay, or the studentloans pay, so its sort of like ’subsidized’, but financing college has gotten so out of control that there’s a trend toward people living off-campus and doubling up on the bedrooms, which is how they stack them in the dorms anyway. I think the belief that renting a house will always be a profitable activity is what helped run prices up here, and that is changing now…
cheers!
Dead cat bounce…knife will soon continue to fall…
NHZ,
why would the government try to push up rental rates? To do that as a means to justify home prices is moronic and will only encourage more malinvestment as well take larger qunatities of disposable income to cover shelter costs. Moronic and shortsighted.
see my comment above; the housing minister is a former project developer and more than half of the government owns/owned a RE business or has a spouse or direct family member who owns such a company. They represent the RE industry, not the citizens.
shortsighted yes, but as you know most politicians don’t look further than the next elections which is one year to go here.
If they can keep the bubble afloat up to then, why worry?
and why worry about malinvestment, RE and ‘equity extraction’ has become the lifeblood of the Dutch economy in the last 10 years or so, just like in the US. That’s why the economy went from one of the best in the EU to the worst of all 25 EU member states (behind Portugal, Poland etc.) as soon as the double digit home price growth stopped (a few years ago). Government couldn’t care less.
the middle class is suffering, but big business is having party time over here (something reminds me of the US again).
Ben pls check this out - Nysar numbers are in, but there’s something odd about them:
http://www.nysar.com
their figures for franklin and schulyer counties for price hikes from dec. 05-Jan-06 seem, uh, juiced:
http://www.nysar.com/pdfs/monthmedian.pdf
The Dutch government wanting to push up rent prices? So they tax everyone, and the lucky 75% get a subsidy? What a joke.
actually, it’s very clever:
1. the political right is happy because most of them own at least one house and this drives up home prices (and for those that rent out their other homes, even higher rents is great of course). Besides, 70% of voters in the country are homeowners so increasing home prices is a sure way to win the elections.
2. the political left is happy because they can now give away even more government money to their voters as rental subsidies. And for their not-so-fortunate voters who want to become a homeowner there is of course a wide choice of loans and subsidies for starters, migrants, young families, pensioners etc.
3. if you do not own a home and are not ‘disadvantaged’ in some kind of way you are totally out of luck because you pay the bill for all the others. Maybe you can now imagine why emigration is booming lately and some Dutch citizens look forward to emigrating to a housing bubble country like Oz? As these people leave the country or just pay the tax bills because they have no other choice, politics does not have to worry about them.
Does anyone have inforamtion in terms of how much more experience compare Sydney RE with OC ?
From my personel experience, I will say about 25% more.
Meanwhile, I fell OC already about 25% overvauled.
NHZ,
‘Maybe you can now imagine why emigration is booming lately and some Dutch citizens look forward to emigrating to a housing bubble country like Oz?’
Exactly… housing is one of the reasons why we will be moving to Oz end this year. We have had it here.
Another reason I see which prevents house price to go down is scarcity. With 16.5 million on a small patch of land and laws (dictated by politics and vested interests) to ‘protect’ the country side and forests, building is nearly impossible. Unless of course if you have the connections to have the zoning adapted.
The only thing politicians come up with is making plans to make housing more affordable. Latest pre-election plan I heard last week was a proposal to provide governmental issued zero-interest mortgages for first time home owners. That will sure help …. to move prices up again.
I think prices will only come down if they remove or cap the interest tax deduction but that will never happen as it would be political suicide….. and would hurt the pockets of the RE industry.
sure; I was planning to move to New Zealand some time ago for similar reasons, but that proves to be quite difficult if you are a small business owner
The trouble with ‘zoning’ is that it provides big profits for local government (probably their main source of income now) and big RE developers. In my area, there is plenty of farmland available at 4-10 euro/m2, while land for housing costs 50-100x more. Any changes to these regulations will bring down the national government, it has happened before …
I think the zoning will change somehow anyway because it is not sustainable. Maybe if the EEC farming subsidies are removed there will be more incentive to change unproductive farmland into building areas and all the ’shortage’ will magically disappear.
I think changes in the HMD are also inevitable, because if mortgage rates really start rising the tax office (income tax) will take a huge hit (while at the same time government will have to bail out many stupid buyers from the NHG etc.). If you add to that the trend change in population numbers, the outlook for Dutch home prices in the long term is very, very bad - but for the moment they keep defying gravity.
Special incentives for first time home owners: we already have those here (from local government), and it’s even ‘better’ than the new proposal. Starters get a 50.000 euro free loan; if they sell the home at a loss later they don’t have to pay it back. If they decide to keep the house they have to start paying interest on the loan after a few years, but at below-market rates. So: if the home appreciates they can sell it at a profit, and if it goes down in value they can sell it as well and stuff local government with the loss. Easy money, as always. I’m sure most ’starter homes’ will be up by 50.000 EUR within a year; the guys who own most of these homes now are laughing all the way to the bank.
Yep it is not easy to get in. We got in via the skilled immigration procedure, took us 2 years to obtain the visa.
From what I read, small business is probably hard for Oz too. Fastest way is if you have a skill in the high the priority list, which includes engineering, but also hairdressers, car mechanics etc. Have you considered going to Oz first? I think that after 2 year Oz you would be automatically entitled to move to NZ.
Anyway success if you are still trying.
I definitely prefer NZ to Oz (Oz is much easier to get in though if you have good education and some cash …). I have always been self-employed, so getting a job for at least 2 years just to get residence is not a good idea. It now takes at least 5 years of Oz residence to get into New Zealand so that’s no longer an attractive option.
but I’m keeping my eyes open, NZ immigration policies are just as variable as their weather so who knows. Judging from the NZ$ exchange rates the economic boom in NZ is over for the moment, so there will be some winds of change blowing.