Buying New v Buying Established Webinar Replay
Hotspotting
Everyone seeking real estate in desirable locations has the same complaint: the lack of stock. Home buyers, investors, buyers’ agents and selling agents are all being frustrated by the shortage of listings of properties for sale – particularly quality options. Leading national buyers’ agency Adviseable says a partial solution for buyers is to consider building from scratch rather than buying an established property. The tactic has many advantages – and one or two problems as well. Alex Dutt of Adviseable says deciding whether to buy an established property or to go down the new...
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Think Twice: Negative Gearing Myths
Hotspotting
In my experience, most people who have a loud view about scrapping negative gearing are people who can’t explain what it is, how it works, why it’s bad and how ending it would solve all the problems in the housing industry. Mostly, what’s in play with this issue is THE POLITICS OF ENVY – that nagging feeling some people have, that others are doing better than they are, or are receiving benefits that they are not, and therefore need to be squashed. As a famous Indian guru once observed, some people try to be tall by cutting off the heads of others. Contrast that with the views that are...
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Rising Rents, Real Reason
Hotspotting
Politicians and journalists love to scapegoat and demonise, particularly with issues impacting housing markets – with property investors always a popular target. Australia’s love of scapegoating is one of the reasons the nation seldom resolves any of the key issues it faces. Politicians hold press conferences, they stage inquiries, they bring on royal commissions, they make announcements – but the recurring theme is looking for someone to blame and to vilify – preferably someone other than themselves. In real estate, investors and related issues like negative gearing are blamed for all...
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Rental Crisis Deepens
Hotspotting
How long could we reasonably expect governments to take, to sort out a problem like the rental shortage? I ask the question because we have had the problem of a shortage of options for tenants in Australia – and the consequent steep rises in rents - for a very long time. And it keeps getting worse, not better. The latest data from SQM Research shows that, nationally, the vacancy rate got a little worse last month, dropping from 1.3% in August to 1.2% in September. Three of our capital cities have vacancies well below 1%. And in six of the eight capital cities, vacancies stayed the same...
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Stop the Distraction: Negative Gearing Isn’t the Real Issue
Hotspotting
There is one thing that Australian politicians are really good at – possibly the only thing - and that is diverting attention from the real issues and scapegoating others for the problems that they, the politicians, have caused. Right now, the core issues impacting Australian households include the housing shortage, the high cost of creating desperately needed new homes, the chronic rental shortage and the reality that rents keep on rising. It’s noteworthy that the recent AGM of the Commonwealth Bank reported that they have had to provide emergency payment arrangements to 132,000 customers...
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Albo's Housing Hypocrisy
Hotspotting
Australia is struggling with a number of crisis situations – a cost-of-living crisis, a housing affordability crisis and a rental shortage crisis. Our beloved Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declared on many occasions how much he cares about the plight of ordinary Australians in dealing with these issues. But, as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words – and that is particularly relevant to our elected representatives who love to stand before the media cameras and declare their concern for the people but fail to match their words with appropriate actions. So, let’s look...
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Why Affordable Outshines Prime in Real Estate
Hotspotting
Residential real estate abounds with fallacies and misconceptions, mostly created by dishonest politicians, biased journalists and economists who don’t understand property. One of the biggest is the one that claims that so-called prime property shows the best capital growth. A year ago I attended a national conference for real estate professionals at which a keynote speaker expressed the view that you had to buy “prime” to get good capital growth – and indeed proclaimed that if you couldn’t buy prestige property you shouldn’t buy at all – or at least wait until you could afford...
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Politicians Are Making Aussie Homes Unaffordable—Here’s How
Hotspotting
There’s endless commentary about housing affordability in Australia but very little awareness that the fundamental issue is the high cost of creating new homes – and that our politicians are the cause of the problem. The value of dwellings across the nation is underpinned by the cost in building new ones – and, in Australia, that cost is incredibly, ridiculously high. And it’s high because of the policies of our elected representatives, at all levels of government, but particularly state government politicians. Right now, after massive increases in building costs in recent years, you...
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Is Population Growth Misleading for Property Investors?
Hotspotting
How relevant is population growth data for people choosing where to buy? According to the theories espoused by some, the best places to buy are the ones with the highest population growth. But the evidence suggests otherwise. For example, take a look at the latest data on population growth across Australia, published by the ABS recently. It shows that one of the states with the highest population growth has been one of the worst performers recently on price growth, while one of the states with the lowest population growth has been one of Australia’s best performers on price growth. For the...
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Home Approvals Drop as Australia Faces Housing Shortage
Hotspotting
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data has recorded a decline in the number of dwelling approvals across the country. Total dwelling approvals saw a drop of 6.1 per cent in the month of August, at a time when Australia needs to be building a lot more homes. According to ABS head of construction statistics, Daniel Rossi, private dwellings excluding houses were the main contributor to the decline – in other words, there has been a big decrease in approvals for attached dwellings like units and townhouses. This has resulted in a 16.5 per cent fall in approvals for those types of...
info_outlineCoreLogic is one of Australia's leading sources of data on residential real estate matters, although increasingly overshadowed by other, smarter data organisations like PropTrack.
CoreLogic has lots of statistics about housing markets but when it comes to analysis and commentary, CoreLogic is very often a source of illogic.
Their problem, like so many companies that comment on Australian housing markets, is that they employ economists to analyse real estate and the outcome very often is kindergarten analysis.
Here’s a recent example:
According to CoreLogic’s Regional Market Update, property markets outside the capital cities are experiencing a slowdown in value growth because, they say, fewer people are moving from the cities to the regions and because of the elevated interest rate environment.
Regional markets saw dwelling values increase by 1.3% over the three months to July.
CoreLogic economist, Kaytlin Ezzy, said this means the pace of growth has eased from recent peaks.
She noted, however, that growth trends across Australia’s 50 largest regional markets have become increasingly diverse, including 11 regions which saw values rise by more than 3% in the quarter.
So here’s what wrong with that analysis, for want of a better word.
Firstly, they have made the common error of placing great significance on short-term data. The rate of price growth, overall on average across regional Australia, is less than it was a few months earlier, apparently, therefore they say that the market is declining.
But price graphs are seldom smooth and future months may see a return to higher price rises. It’s always unwise to declare a new trend based on one recent set of short-term figures.
Secondly, they claim internal migration to the regions is no longer happening as strongly as before. The latest Regional Movers Index, jointly published by the Commonwealth Bank and the Regional Australia Institute, strongly disagrees with that statement. It shows that Australians continue to relocate from Sydney and Melbourne to regional areas in large numbers.
Thirdly, the claim that elevated interest rates are causing a decline is farcically stupid. The RBA started lifting the official interest rate in May 2022 and it rose steadily (by a total of four percentage points) until November 2023. So interest rates have been elevated for over two years – and there has been no further rise in the past nine months – but now, according to Core Illogic, elevated interest rates are causing a decline in regional property markets.
And how does that theory sit alongside the reality that, according to Core Illogic, 11 regions recorded a rise of more than 3% in the latest quarter?
They say that “if you torture statistics enough, they’ll tell you anything you want to hear”.
That’s particularly true for economists who subscribe to the theory that everything that happens in residential real estate is caused by interest rate trends, notwithstanding lots of compelling evidence to the contrary.
The truth is that we still have a situation where many of Australia’s strongest property markets for price growth are in the regional areas, headed by boom regional centres like Bunbury, Mandurah and Geraldton in Western Australia, and Rockhampton, Toowoomba and Townsville in Queensland.
Regional Australia continues to provide the best options for investors seeking affordable prices, higher rental yields and good prospects for capital growth, provided you choose your location with care.