(07-06-2015, 10:11 AM)greengiraffe Wrote: [ -> ]Bubble trouble
1112 words
6 Jun 2015
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2015. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.
Housing Are warnings from several quarters of a dangerously hot property market cause for alarm? Robert Harley considers the evidence.
The bubble babble, led this week by warnings from Treasury Secretary John Fraser and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is a timely reminder that house prices will not rise for ever. And when the boom is over, prices will subside.
On consensus, Sydney housing is not yet in bubble territory. Price growth elsewhere in the country is moderate, though specific markets show bubble characteristics. In the resource towns of the Pilbara and central Queensland, the bubble has clearly burst. In Melbourne's CBD, the sheer volume of new supply looks like a bubble in the making.
Rapid house price growth in the country's two biggest cities is not just a problem for Sydneysiders or Melburnians. As shown in the table on the next page, there have been substantial prices gains over the past three years in Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has hinted that it is not so worried about a price correction causing pain for the banks and threatening financial stability. Its real concern is for the broader economy. Falling house prices would make Australians feel poorer and likely cause them to spend less on discretionary items. This would weigh on business and consumer confidence, add to slowing pressures on the entire economy - and affect house prices everywhere.
For those looking to buy or sell - particularly in Sydney - the traditional benchmark, the interest rate lever, is on full throttle.
For Sydney house prices to slow down, there would have to be a number of forces at play - perhaps the city becoming unaffordable, or because of a surge in new supply that was much stronger than in the boom of the early 2000s. Other triggers could be investment returns dropping, crimped investor buying thanks to the new macro-prudential controls or slackening demand from offshore. Or if the government suddenly turned against the market with a punitive tax response on negative gearing, land tax or stamp duty for foreign buyers.
ANZ senior economist David Cannington says investors should not look to the past for guidance because the market drivers are changing "pretty quickly". For Cannington, the current exuberance is a "rational" response to the step down in mortgage rates.
The "current mix is pretty unusual", says Westpac senior economist Matthew Hassan. "How those pieces of the puzzle fit together is hard to know. It's about trying to guess where the surprise will come from," he adds. "Interest rates are pretty accommodating, so you are trying to second-guess non-standard policy measures. It is very hard to gauge their effectiveness and the willingness of regulators to apply pressure."
Hassan says rising supply will start to have more effect in 2016.
"That could see a more abrupt slowdown. But to get substantive price declines, you need an aggressive rise in interest rates, a change in the availability of credit or a weakening in macroeconomic conditions."
For Macquarie Capital's head of real estate strategy, Rod Cornish, the key is affordability - measured as the proportion of household income needed to meet mortgage payments. Significantly, Sydney's affordability has hardly changed in the past year, with interest rate falls and rises in household income offsetting the jump in prices.
"Housing affordability is still not yet at a tipping point for a broad downturn, though it is closest in Sydney," Cornish says. "It does take interest rate increases to tip the balance for affordability.
"Affordability is the overriding factor ahead of turning points in the cycle. Lower rates will immediately improve affordability but we expect the tipping point level to be eventually reached in Sydney first, then Melbourne through higher house prices." Cornish does note that the demand-supply equation, which has long kept upward pressure on prices and rents, is starting to change. The rate of growth in population and net overseas migration is starting to moderate. "The population demand/housing supply balance will start to shift this year … and increased supply will have an impact on the equation over the next few years," he says. "The annual demand/supply balance is to remain positive in NSW this year but decline elsewhere."
Tim Lawless, national research director of house price analyst group CoreLogic, says affordability constraint and the challenges in obtaining credit will start to have an impact. He notes that, with average housing debt now more than 140 per cent of household income, it will not take much of a rise in mortgage rates to slow demand.
"Those investors buying around the peak, which will be pretty soon, may not see much capital gain for some time, even experience some falls, at a time when cash flows will be low to negative," he says, pointing out that Sydney took four years to recover its peak of the early 2000s.
So what does a price collapse look like? Over the past 45 years, Australia has had six house price corrections. Prices did correct after each boom but, according to numbers from Westpac, not very far.
The worst was in the mid-1970s when, after years of economic growth, high migration and a resources boom, Sydney land prices were rising at 5 per cent a month. The boom collapsed under the weight of rising interest rates, oversupply, global economic downturn and the turmoil of the Whitlam years, taking with it a plethora of property companies, financiers and ultimately the Bank of Adelaide.
Yet house prices in Sydney and Melbourne fell by only 15 per cent, in real (after-inflation) terms. This would have caused pain at the time but was forgotten within five years as prices surged into the 1980s.
Prices have fallen further in specific sectors. The supposedly gold-plated mansions lining Sydney harbour lost nearly half their value in the early 1990s as the corporate high flyers who had bid up their prices went broke. In the Pilbara, investors have lost half the value of their property investments, and generally all their equity.
But in half a century Australia has not had a housing bust like the US collapse that preceded the global financial crisis. Caused by massive oversupply (with 2 million homes vacant at the end of the boom) and a collapse in credit, US home values fell around 30 per cent and up to 60 per cent in cities like Las Vegas.
The key factor is interest rates. The challenge for the Reserve Bank in trying to rein in the boom, and for investors, is to predict its future in the new "lower for longer" mortgage rate environment.
Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited
Document AFNR000020150605eb660001m
Highs and lows of a hot market
1130 words
6 Jun 2015
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2015. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.
Housing Which neighbourhoods are most vulnerable to price falls if the bubble bursts, asks Duncan Hughes.
Outer suburbs up to 40 kilometres from central business districts have posted some of the biggest gains in real estate prices during the past 12 months, as soaring prices for prestige inner suburbs push buyers further out, an analysis of the nation's best-performing postcodes shows.
Traditionally wealthy inner suburbs in Melbourne and Brisbane have also nearly doubled in value in the past year, more than twice the rise of Sydney's "super hot" top performers, despite the huge number of new apartments being built, increasing supply and possibly pushing down prices.
Other capitals, such as Perth and Darwin, are posting falls in property values and rental income, despite double-digit gains in some suburbs, as the minerals slump reduces demand for real estate. At the same time projects started during the boom times are being completed and boosting supply.
The mixed performance has caused some leading analysts and advisers to challenge Treasury secretary John Fraser's claim that there is "unequivocally" a housing bubble in Sydney and evidence of a "bubble in the higher-priced areas of Melbourne".
"We do not - and should not - have a bubble," says Andrew Wilson, senior economist for Domain Group, about the conditions for a precipitous slump across the nation's residential housing market.
He says there are as many "property markets" as postcodes because of local issues, such as unemployment, affordability and overseas buyers, that influence the behaviour of buyers and sellers.
Real estate agents in outer Sydney suburbs that have posted the biggest gains describe the rises as "unbelievable and unprecedented".
"It's super hot," says Janeta Biviano, a director of Ray White Real Estate, about price rises in Sydney's western suburbs.
Biviano is based in Homebush, about 15 kilometres west of Sydney's central business district, where median prices during the past three years have jumped more than 80 per cent to $1.2 million.
"It's a golden nest egg for sellers. Buyers are fighting against each other," she says of bidders pushing up apartment prices by tens of thousands of dollars in the same block over a month.
In Schofields, about 30 kilometres west of Sydney, prices have risen by 75 per cent during the past 12 months, despite it being an hour's train trip from Sydney and a two-hour drive in peak traffic. Much of the area was farm fields only five years ago.
Joshua Meyer, project and development consultant for LJ Hooker Real Estate, says: "It's a real mixed bag of buyers. Anything from investors, to mum and dads, Aussie battlers … I scratch my head as to how they afford it."
Agents say many buyers claim they have been priced out of inner Sydney and are frightened of being priced out of the market.
Average loans for Sydney buyers are increasing at twice the rate of growth of median incomes, Adelaide Bank reports.
Christopher Koren, principal of buyer's advocacy Morrell and Koren, advises investors or home buyers considering new developments to look before they leap.
"Consider what it costs in tolls, transport, how much and how long to get from X to Y. It will take years for infrastructure to catch up," Koren says.
The biggest and most sustained rises are happening in traditional middle-class suburbs, typically along the eastern seaboard, populated by households with secure incomes, savings and good prospects, Wilson says.
For example, median prices in leafy Ascot, an affluent suburb seven kilometres from the city centre and renowned for its beautiful old homes, have nearly doubled during the past three years to $1.2 million. That means a decade of capital appreciation in one year, if the traditional mantra of residential property values doubling every 10 years is applied, agents say.
Traditional middle-class, two-income family suburbs about 15 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, such as Box Hill, Glen Waverley and Wantirna South, have posted gains of more than 40 per cent in the past three years, making the region one of the nation's top performers.
"These middle markets are reasonably immune to sharp falls," Wilson says.
But Martin North, principal of Digital Finance Analytics, a boutique research group, says rapid price increases are out of kilter with static incomes, low and falling rents (except in Sydney), rising unemployment and sluggish economic growth.
"There's no use calling it an inflating bubble - the horse has already bolted and the barn door has shut," North says. "It's 25 to 30 per cent overvalued. It is going to come back - and when it does, it will come back quickly."
Damian Percy, general manager of Adelaide Bank, says large amounts of overseas investment, particularly from China, are turning Melbourne and Sydney into "an international asset class".
That means the Chinese diaspora, particularly from Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China, look at local real estate as a safe haven for their capital. Ray White's Biviano says foreign buyers are driving up prices by between 20 and 25 per cent.
Some of the nation's worst-performing postcodes highlight how the loss of an industry, or an economic slowdown, can weaken demand, lower confidence and cause prices to fall.
In Gladstone, just over 500 kilometres north of Brisbane's leafy New Farm, property values have nearly halved during the past five years after a residential building and speculative boom collapsed when plans for a major coal development fizzled out.
It's a similar situation in parts of Perth, until recently a market for minting property millionaires, where prices are falling because a steep downturn in mineral prices has reduced jobs, investment and wealth.
Trigg, a beachside suburb about 14 kilometres north of Perth, posted the biggest gains during the past 12 months with 20 per cent, or a median price of just over $1 million. Perth rents have fallen by about 6 per cent for apartments and houses during the past 12 months.
In Darwin, where the mining boom also triggered a speculative building boom, rents for houses have fallen by more than 15 per cent over the same period.
In Munno Para, about 30 kilometres north of Adelaide, the planned closure in 2017 of the nearby Holden plant, a major local employer, has contributed to property prices plunging by nearly 24 per cent during the past 12 months.
Property investors should look for unique qualities, such as proximity to facilities and transport and good design, to underwrite long-term value.
"Go in with your eyes open," North says.
He recommends investors consider what would happen if prices corrected by 30 per cent and income from rentals needed to pay borrowings was static.
Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited
Document AFNR000020150605eb660001l