Home Prices – Page 30 – Digital Finance Analytics (DFA) Blog

Annual NZ House Prices Fall For The First Time Since 2011!

The REINZ released their July 2022 data and it tells a continuing story of a weaker market as activity and prices continue to ease and New Zealand house prices falling in July with the median price recording its first annual fall since 2011. The seasonally adjusted median nationwide house value in July fell 2.8% compared with the previous month and was down 1.6% year-on-year, according to REINZ.

The unadjusted median house price was down 1.8% on year. “While the median property price is showing an annual decrease, affordability remains an obstacle for many — which is now being driven by rising interest rates, inflation and tighter lending criteria,” said Jen Baird, chief executive at REINZ, in a news release.

House prices in New Zealand jumped more than 40% in the two years to November 2021. However, a combination of tighter credit, more housing and rising mortgage rates is now weighing on prices.

Kiwibank senior economist Jeremy Couchman said in a note that the first fall in 11 years might be a shock but it needs to be noted that the price falls only put house prices back at levels seen last May. “Nevertheless, house prices have further to fall in the current cycle, as credit conditions remain tight, and confidence is lacking,” he said

The RBNZ, which must consider house prices in its policy deliberations, began raising the cash rate in October last year, describing house prices as “unsustainable”.

Since then, it has said it expects prices to fall 15% from their peak in November. ANZ Bank said in a note that housing was now “decidedly cool” and there was not much in the economic outlook to stop that.

Go to the Walk The World Universe at https://walktheworld.com.au/

Land Banking Is Part Of The Housing Problem!

We unpick the “supply-side” problems which are often blamed for high home prices, and in the light of a recent report, find that Land Banking is a significant issue, as large players hold on to land parcels to exploit prices rises. This means you cannot solve affordability by changing planning rules! In addition, there is significant information asymmetry and financial players benefit from the current arrangements – while State and Federal Governments look the other way.

Go to the Walk The World Universe at https://walktheworld.com.au/

Households Hit Hard By The Property Crash!

It started as an act of protest by fed-up apartment buyers in a single project in a city in central China.

Now tens of thousands of people around the country are withholding payments on their mortgages for homes that developers, including China Evergrande Group, have yet to finish.The movement has since spread to at least 301 projects in about 91 cities according to figures from a crowdsourced document titled “WeNeedHome.”

Tracking the extent of the protest has grown increasingly difficult after China began censoring in mid-July crowdsourced online documents tallying the number of boycotts. Such shared files have been a key source of data for global investors and researchers.

Real estate accounts for about 78% of household wealth in China—double the US rate—and families typically save for years and borrow from friends and family to purchase a home. As the Evergrande debacle unfolded last year, many market watchers said that the financial contagion would be limited by the fact that homebuyers in China often pay in cash.

But some did use mortgages, and the boycott underscores how much of the pain of the crisis has fallen on households. China’s outstanding mortgages stood at 38.3 trillion yuan at the end of 2021, according to the People’s Bank of China. GF Securities Co. expects that up to 2 trillion yuan ($296 billion) of mortgages could be impacted by the collective refusals. That’s the total balance of the loans; the amount that could be withheld will be smaller.

Should every buyer default, that would lead to a 388 billion-yuan increase in nonperforming loans, Jefferies’s said. Banks say the impact is much lower still. Lenders have detailed about 2.11 billion yuan of loans at risk from the protests, according toa tally of banks that have disclosed their exposure.

The wildcat boycott on loans worth as much as 2 trillion yuan ($296 billion) threatens to deepen China’s real estate slump by shifting focus from the country’s embattled property companies to its massive banks. Lenders have relied on mortgages as their safest source of revenue as Covid lockdowns stifle growth.

Go to the Walk The World Universe at https://walktheworld.com.au/

Downgrading Housing Forecasts – Fast!

It is becoming a new sport, it seems – trying to assess the potential fall in property values across many markets here and around the world.

Indeed, Christopher Joye in the AFR writes: the great Aussie housing crash is accelerating, and it is being driven by the fastest and largest interest rate shock households have faced in modern history. Sydney house prices have now plunged almost 5 per cent since their peak only months ago according to CoreLogic. Home values in Melbourne are not far behind.

But let’s look at another market, because property price falls are being predicted around the western world, as Central Banks, appear at least, to be coordinating rate rise increases.

We might want to pause to consider the group-think, which has been exhibited for the past two decades – cutting rates after the 2007 and 2008 crisis, cutting them again radically ahead of COVID, to say nothing of the quantitative easing which has flooded markets with cheap money, and rate control, plus handing ultra-cheap funds to banks. I will leave you to judge how independent each central bank was and the degree of collusion, versus common reactions to the same economic out-turns, but the current mode of operation is driving highly inflated home prices which were driven by their bad policy – sharply down as they tighten. Some would suggest the High Priests of Finance, are not as powerful as they may like to appear.

So, let’s look at Canada’s housing market which has sharply shifted since the Bank of Canada began raising its benchmark interest rate from record lows in March. The central bank, seeking to rein in inflation that is running at its hottest in four decades, unveiled its largest one-time interest rate hike since 1998 last week. It raised the benchmark rate a full percentage point to 2.5% and promised more increases to come.

Go to the Walk The World Universe at https://walktheworld.com.au/