The Housing Bubble

A report from Domain News in Australia. “Sydney’s hot property prices and tight rental market have been described as a tenant’s nightmare. But in some suburbs, landlords are reducing their rents to secure a tenant. Sixty kilometres south-west of Sydney CBD, one landlord recently dropped the advertised rent on a three-bedroom house in Narellan. Rented out in 2013 for $430 a week, 22 Mowatt Street was re-advertised last month for $420 a week, Inglis Property Macarthur senior property manager Fia Foglia said. ‘We had no inquiry, no one at the open homes, where six months ago we usually had people queuing up … for a nice, clean rental like this,’ Ms Foglia said. It finally rented after just one person applied.’”

“‘We’ve got another [rental] that has been vacant for six weeks in Oran Park at $550 a week,’ she said. ‘It’s a hard pill for landlords to swallow that they have to drop their rent from $550 to $500.’”

“The weakening of the rental market wasn’t isolated to the south-west, with the outer ring suburbs more broadly seeing rental declines, statistics from the Real Estate Institute of Australia show. It could be a result of high levels of investor activity, which typically occurs in the cheaper outer rings where rental yields are more attractive. The ‘new completions bought in the investor rush of last year’” were starting to hit the market and could be skewing the rental market very quickly, said Real Estate Institute of NSW president John Cunningham.”

The Australian. “Melbourne developer Golden Age will put a 20 per cent cap on the ratio of overseas buyers — mostly Chinese — in its latest Sydney apartment project in a bid to lessen the risk of buyers not ­settling. The company, founded by Chinese born Jeff Xu, released the first stage of its Park One apartments at Macquarie Park in Sydney’s northwest over the weekend and the project’s 230 apartments sold out on the first day.”

“Although the company has only seen a default rate below two per cent in its Melbourne projects, settlement risk is mounting in some pockets of the market, Mr Xu said. ‘Since the banks shut lending to overseas buyers, the apartment market has receded indeed,’ Mr Xu said. ‘Particularly in areas such as Melbourne’s Southbank and Docklands, Sydney’s west, settlement risk will be probably much higher than other areas.’”

“With settlement default potentially transferring risk to ­developers, it would be a very challenging time for those companies to cope if they hadn’t controlled risk in the first place, Mr Xu said. ‘That’s why you will see many companies just sitting there and doing nothing. The market is very different now from a couple of years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s not that easy to launch a new project now. You will have to prepare your display suite quite well now, while for the past few years you might not need it at all to sell apartments.’”

The Gold Coast Bulletin. “A group that was one of the earlier major Chinese investors in the Gold Coast property market has taken a lakeside bath. Huidong appears to have lost $5 million or more on a 2010 investment in a parcel of land within the Hope Island Resort. As is often the case, where there’s a loser there’s a winner and in this case it’s another Chinese group — the owner of the resort’s golf club, Golden Horse. It’s picked up Huidong’s site, which can provide 46 housing lots, but is in no rush to come out of the development starting gates.”

“If the Hope Island buy was merely an Australian entree, it eventually didn’t suit Huidong’s investment tastebuds. It stopped civil works after around $3 million had been spent in an exercise that included moving 36,000 cubic metres of pre-load material on to the site. Later Chinese property agents from Melbourne started quietly touting the land around the market.”

“Golden Horse cantered in with a $10.12 million offer, Huidong accepted it, and the money’s been paid. The restaurateur’s losses include $880,000 on the land, $3 million on earthworks on its raw site, and probably well north of $1 million on body corporate fees and other holding costs.”

From Smart Property Investment. “After experiencing phenomenal price growth of 97 per cent at the height of the mining boom, the fortunes of one formerly popular investment region have well and truly turned. The Isaac LGA in Queensland, including the smaller towns of Dysart and Moranbah, had a 97 per cent rise in median house prices between December 2007 and March 2012 – but this has since declined by 83 per cent, according to QBE’s recently released Housing Outlook 2016-19 report.”

“At the start of the upturn in December 2007, the median price in the Isaac LGA was $335,000, with 451 sales over the previous year. By the cycle’s peak in March 2012, prices were up to $660,000 with 658 sales. Prices now sit well below even their starting point, at just $110,000 with 93 sales over the year to June 2016, the report said.”

“The contrast between boom and bust has been stark. ‘Median house prices climbed rapidly through the early boom period as the influence of mining investment led to job creation, population growth and demand for housing. As the mining investment wound down, median house prices fell sharply while unemployment rates grew rapidly and population left,’ the report said.”

“The report noted sales volumes in all mining centres fell significantly in 2015/16. ‘It is likely that many owners would rather hold onto their property than sell at a loss, with a large proportion of sales likely to be forced sales, thereby placing further downward pressure on the median price.’”