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What’s behind the extraordinary resilience in house prices?
It’s a scenario that no economist – or real estate agent – could ever have dreamt was possible.
As the Reserve Bank has tightened monetary policy to dampen inflationary pressures, the average interest rate on a new home loan has more than trebled, rising from around 2 per cent just over a year ago, to more than 6 per cent at present.
Sydney house prices, especially at the top end, are rising strongly.
But despite this steep rise in borrowing costs, national house prices have suffered a relatively modest decline of around 6 per cent from the peaks reached in April 2022.
Even more remarkably, house prices appear to again be pushing higher. According to CoreLogic, national home values rose 2.8 per cent in the June quarter, the highest quarterly rise since January 2022.
According to both economists – and real estate agents – the only way to explain extraordinary resilience in house prices is to look at the fundamental imbalance in the housing market, where demand continues to significantly outstrip the limited supply of housing.
Real estate agents in particular report that housing prices are finding support because there’s not much housing stock on the market – the number of houses advertised for sale in capital cities is roughly 25 per cent below levels of the past five years – compared to the large numbers of people looking to buy.
But what’s driving the voracious demand for housing? According to economists, there are several factors that are helping to shore up demand.
In the first place, there’s the robust labour market, which is translating into stronger wages growth. With the jobless rate at close to a 50-year low, it’s likely that more people feel financially secure enough to take on a large mortgage.
It’s likely that this confidence in the state of their personal financial situation is being reinforced by the widespread view that the Reserve Bank is close to the end of its monetary tightening cycle.
That means that prospective home buyers only need to reassure themselves that they could easily manage their mortgage repayments if interest rates were to rise by a further 25, or 50, basis points.
Indeed, most home buyers appear to assume that the period of painfully high mortgage rates will be relatively brief, and that home loan rates will soon drop back to much lower levels.
Some economists also argue that the strength of housing demand also reflects the huge increase in building costs. If people expect that building costs will continue to soar, it makes financial sense for them to borrow to get into the housing market now, rather than waiting and paying higher prices in future.
But there’s no doubt that the most important factor boosting housing demand has been the surge in Australia’s migrant intake, which is now expected to jump to its highest level on record as 400,000 people enter the country this year.
This migration boom intensifies the squeeze in the rental market, as migrants compete with locals for the limited supply of properties available for lease.
At the same time, surging rents help to offset the cost of rising interest rates for landlords.
But the influx of new migrants is also fuelling the rise in house prices. Real estate agents report that there is a proportion of wealthy new migrants with serious money to spend on local real estate, and are looking to buy properties in desirable, affluent areas.
According to CoreLogic, the high end of Sydney’s housing market continues to lead capital growth, rising 5.7 per cent for the three months to June.
A 2019 research paper, “The impact of immigration on housing prices in Australia” – which was co-written by RMIT University’s Morteza Moallemi, and Monash University’s Daniel Melser – found that “an immigrant inflow of 1 per cent of a postcode’s population raises housing prices by around 0.9 per cent per year”.
Another reason for the buoyancy of the local housing market is that home loan borrowers were relatively prudent in loading themselves up with debt. Even when interest rates were ultra-low, relatively few people borrowed at their maximum capacity.
And that means that even when their borrowing costs jumped sharply, most borrowers had enough financial flexibility to handle higher repayments.
In addition, as bankers regularly point out, home loan borrowers will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to keep up their loan repayments in order to avoid banks foreclosing on their homes.
All the same, it’s possible that the rebound in house prices that we’ve seen in the past few months could turn out to be a temporary reprieve, and that prices will soon resume their downward trajectory.
Some analysts believe that, eventually, the housing market will buckle under the impact of rising unemployment and soaring mortgage costs. |
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发表于 2023-7-17 18:13
