According to the big boss at the RBA, property prices in Australia may decline, but they won’t crash like they have in the USA and elsewhere:
“Indeed, prices probably are falling - gently. But I think there are enough differences in the US versus Australia dynamic between the US. We certainly shouldn’t assume there is going [...]
Australian property prices fell slightly during the September quarter, with an Australia-wide fall of around 1.8%. Some of the hardest hit suburbs are also the wealthiest, with inner Melbourne suburbs tumbling by up to 13.2%. This is unexpected, with a lot of people thinking that inner-city suburbs were the safest bet.
Anyway, some experts are [...]
Leveraged beyond our means. That is the cause of the global financial crisis, according to The Age’s Ross Gittins.
“In the past decade, the housing boom — including the welter of negative gearing — has seen their total debt double relative to their disposable income from 80% to almost 160%.
That is our great vulnerability. If Australia [...]
Despite the shaky, crazy things going on in finance markets around the world, now is the time to buy real estate. There are a lot of properties on the market right now, at least in Brisbane where things have gone ballistic in the past few weeks. So if you’re shopping for a home, you’ll have [...]
First home buyers are checking out the market, learning what’s available, but they aren’t yet buying real estate. And that’s to be expected. Many of them had, until recently, pretty much given up on purchasing their own home. Prices were skyrocketing, and the old $7,000 First Home Owners Grant had long since been off-set by [...]
Yale economist Robert J. Shiller has released a graph showing the change in American property values from 1890, and projected forward to 2011.
This data is based on using an 1890 property selling for the modern inflation-adjusted equivalent of $100,000 US. Property values experienced mini-booms in the 1970s and 1980s, but it is the enormous spike [...]
“Eighty per cent of the Australian population lives in the coastal zone, and approximately 711,000 addresses are within three kilometres of the coast and less than six metres above sea level.”
- Department of Climate Change
I’ve spoken before about the problem of rising sea levels and the potential for it to inundate Australian homes (see “Coastal [...]
The television news bulletins are talking up the possibility of good times ahead for real estate in Australia, suggesting that investors fleeing the stockmarket will jump into the property market. An investor buying frenzy would certainly be a positive, even if it simply gets property moving again and doesn’t actually push prices up. CommSec senior [...]
According to Professor Steve Keen, Australia’s property market is set to drop. What we’ve seen in America has been bad, but what we might be about to see here could be nasty. But then you’ve got other people (especially real estate agents) saying that supply is still outstripping demand, and therefore property prices can only [...]
There’s a rental shortage across Australia at the moment, but it’s particularly bad in Sydney. Recent data suggests that there are just 739 properties currently available for rent in Sydney, a vacancy rate of just 1.2 per cent. You’d expect this would push rental prices up, making property investment a far more attractive deal than [...]
