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Home Ownership Dream Thrives

Hotspotting

Release Date: 08/13/2024

Rent Confusion show art Rent Confusion

Hotspotting

If you’re confused about what’s happening with rents in Australia, you can be forgiven.   That’s especially so if you use news media as your main source of information about residential real estate.   The information – or perhaps more correctly, misinformation – in news media is highly confusing and in many cases contradictory, with one headline saying the complete opposite to another.   Here are two headlines that appeared on the same day, the 10th of January:   The worst is over: slowest rise in rents in four years Affordability crisis: tenants feel the pinch as...

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Albanese  Housing Denial show art Albanese Housing Denial

Hotspotting

The Prime Minister is suffering from a serious case of denial if he believes that his press conference soundbite about building 1.2 million new homes is plausible, credible and achievable.   Anthony Albanese had his big media event in August 2023 when he stated this objective of 1.2 million new homes in five years – but almost 18 months later it’s abundantly clear to everyone except members of the government that it’s not going to happen – indeed, was NEVER going to happen.   It’s almost as if the PM and his cohorts believed that staging the publicity event in 2023 was all...

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Price Data show art Price Data

Hotspotting

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Building Collapses show art Building Collapses

Hotspotting

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Approvals V Construction show art Approvals V Construction

Hotspotting

Two very different headlines have summed up the problems for Australia’s ongoing housing shortage. One of the recent media headlines declared that building approvals were at a two-year high and that things were improving for the nation’s housing shortage.  The other described why building approvals are almost irrelevant – it said that project deferrals are occurring at a record rate. The reality of the current crisis is this: it doesn’t matter how many houses and apartments are approved for construction – and it doesn’t matter how many re-zonings state governments push through...

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Webinar Replay: Reflections & Projections - A Deep Dive into Real Estate Trends & Forecasts show art Webinar Replay: Reflections & Projections - A Deep Dive into Real Estate Trends & Forecasts

Hotspotting

In this insightful webinar, Terry Ryder, founder of Hotspotting, and Tim Graham, Hotspotting’s General Manager, analyze the surprises and trends of 2024 in the Australian property market and share their projections for 2025. With decades of combined experience, they provide investors with actionable advice on navigating the coming year. Key Highlights 2024 in Review Defying Predictions: Despite high interest rates and inflationary pressures, property prices rose by an average of 5.53% nationally in 2024. Perth led with an astonishing 18.7% growth, followed by regional Western Australia,...

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Best Buys Result show art Best Buys Result

Hotspotting

You don’t have to be super rich or invest $1 million to make big capital gains in residential real estate: you just need to follow Hotspotting’s signature report, the National Top 10 Best Buys report. Those who followed the tips in our report of a year ago could have made close to $100,000 in capital gains spending as little as $400,000 – or $180,000 in gains after investing $630,000. In December 2023 we published our National Top Best Buys reports for Summer 2023-34. Our top 10 locations for investors to consider covered a wide range of price points, from less than $300,000 and above $1...

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Listings Rise show art Listings Rise

Hotspotting

The greatest complaint heard most often in real estate across Australia is that there are plenty of buyers, but a shortage of listings.   The number of properties for sale has been well short of the levels needed for a balanced market, particularly in the boom cities of Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.   But that is steadily changing. According to SQM Research, total listings of properties for sale nationwide grew 7.6% in November and are now more than 10% higher than a year ago.   Perhaps most significantly, there were major rises in November in those three boom cities, with the...

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Media Absurdities show art Media Absurdities

Hotspotting

Things are constantly changing in real estate nationwide but the one factor that never changes is this:  we can always rely on news media to distort the facts and deliver a steady flow of misinformation to Australian consumers, all in the interests of attracting readership, with little regard for accuracy, honesty or fairness. The past week or so has been chockful of media nonsense. If you can believe the headlines, the national property boom is over, house prices are plunging, the rental boom is over and the North Queensland city of Townsville is a mining town. One of the constants of my...

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2025 Predictions show art 2025 Predictions

Hotspotting

Rumours of the death of ‘the national property boom’ are greatly exaggerated – especially since we didn’t have a national property boom in 2024. Rather, over the past 12 months, we have seen differing market cycles in many locations - as is the usual state of play in real estate throughout Australia. Strong property price growth was recorded in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane in 2024, but not in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Darwin or Hobart.    Similarly, in the regional areas, there were declining and stagnating markets, as well as some where prices were showing good price...

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More Episodes

There are two opposing story lines circulating in news media about Australian real estate ownership.

One story line, repeated regularly by media, is that the Great Australian Dream is dead and that young Australian adults can no longer afford to buy homes.

The other one, revealed whenever the Australian Bureau of Statistics releases official data on real estate finance, tends to suggest that the dream is very much alive – and indeed thriving.

In fact, the latest lending figures show major increases in buying activity by all types of real estate consumers, including first-home buyers.

Media loves negative sensation about housing affordability and very often the truth is optional. 

Some organisations who crave publicity to lift the profile of their businesses regularly feed this weakness in news media by creating bogus reports about Australian housing affordability.

They do this, usually, by applying a set of parameters that are irrelevant and unrealistic.

Here’s a typical example: a so-called research organisation will create a report which examines how long it takes a young couple to save a 20% deposit to buy a house at the median price in Sydney or Melbourne.

Or how much a person needs to earn to achieve a loan for this.

Now, there are multiple reasons why this is a nonsense designed to create a headline rather than inform the public. These reports are full of furphies.

Furphy No.1 – you don’t need a 20% deposit. You can get into real estate ownership with a 10% deposit or even a 5% deposit.

Furphy No.2 – first-home buyers don’t buy at the median price in Sydney or Melbourne or anywhere else. They buy in the lower price ranges. The city median is irrelevant to the circumstances of young buyers and the issue of affordability.

Furphy No.3 – these reports always overlook attached dwellings as an option for buyers seeking affordability. In many capital city suburbs, the median price for units is half the median price for houses. But these bogus reports never speak about this viable, popular and more affordable option.

Why are these so-called research reports full of irrelevant and misleading information? Because the goal is NOT to inform people, or help people, or improve the situation for the community. The goal is always self-serving and dishonest – to create free publicity by generating alarm in the community.

And journalists are happy to recycle this nonsense as factual news.

In Sydney, the median house price is close to $1.5 million (according to CoreLogic) but that is irrelevant to people seeking affordability in our most expensive capital city. 

What is considerably MORE relevant is how much it costs to buy a unit in the Canterbury-Bankstown area of Sydney, where there are plenty of viable options in multiple suburbs in the price range from $400,000 to $600,000.

Or what it costs to buy a house in more affordable parts of Greater Sydney, like the local government areas of Liverpool, Parramatta and Blacktown.

And of course there is the reality that over 20 million Australians live in places other than Sydney and the median house price in our most expensive city is utterly irrelevant to them.

How about some focus on what it costs to buy a house in the affordable northern suburbs of Adelaide, or an apartment in the inner-city Brisbane suburb of Bowen Hills, or in the inner-city Perth suburb of Belmont or a house in outer-ring areas of Greater Melbourne.

And what about regional Australia, which is attracting growing numbers of new residents relocating from the biggest cities in search of a different lifestyle, empowered by technology that allows more and more people to work remotely.

So, let me tell you, the home ownership dream is very much alive right across Australia.

How can I be so sure? Because the official lending data confirms it.

The latest stats from the ABS – which is for the month of June - shows we are currently seeing growing numbers of people buying homes as first-home buyers, other types of owner-occupier buyers and investors.

Lending for the purchase of homes rose 19% in June, compared to a year earlier.

In June lending to owner-occupier buyers was up 13% compared to a year earlier, with an even larger increase in loans to investors. There was also a rise in lending to first-home buyers, though not as large an increase.

It should be fairly self-evident that lending levels would not be rising, including for first-home buyers, if it was true that no one can afford to buy any more.

We have highly active property markets in most parts of Australia and buyers of all kinds are active.

So, next time you see one of those shallow media headlines declaring that the dream is dead and that young Australians are priced out of the market, don’t believe it.