The Nine papers’ months of bubbling property-price reporting finally came to the boil this morning. The Australian Financial Review was packed with breathless coverage of an apparent spike in residential real estate prices.
National affairs editor Jennifer Hewett used her column to share an anecdote of attending an auction with her son, who “made a few limited attempts to get into the buying spirit at a much higher price than either he or his partner thought they should make … But he was quickly trumped by others willing to purchase a modest two-bedroom apartment at a level that would have been considered fantasy several months ago”.
This is joined by reports on Australia’s most expensive residence selling for $140 million, and “desperate”, “frustrated” property buyers who are “paying ‘well over value’ due to a lack of stock at the top end of the market”.
This follows reporting over the weekend on ANZ economists’ predictions that “Sydney and Melbourne house prices will be growing at more than 12% per annum by the middle of next year” by senior economics correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald Shane Wright, as well as the AFR‘s prediction earlier this month that house market growth will return to something “close to boom times”.
Is the hysteria really warranted, or is it just the customary bump in the property market that happens every spring? Of course, reporting in breathless terms on this sellers’ market is in the interests of their Nine stablemate and cash printing machine, Domain…
For many people the dream of home ownership has gone … there needs to be a rethink as to how to provide home ownership to Middle and low wage Australians… there also needs to be a solution to the growing problem of homelessness…
Predictions are notoriously difficult, particularly about the future.
Breathless twaddle about expensive mansions is best ignored. We have serious homelessness problems and no commitment to more public housing or even keeping what we’ve got. Affordable housing for low income people is still around out in the suburban fringes or regional towns as it always was. Problem is the outer urban fringe is really out in woop woop now. And cheap regional housing means towns even further away.
They had their chance at the election and they returned the failed advertising genius who will lead us further down the road of housing unaffordabllity.they didn’t want to know about how pernicious negative gearing is eroding the chance of home ownership for the average wage slave.housing should not have become a tool for speculative investment, it really infuriates me when the media shows up some person in the financial pages as a wonderful, astute investor who owns ten houses when the reality is that he/she has ten poor dopes paying rent on them and thus helping the investor to acquire them.i wonder how many of those eople who are finding it increasingly difficult to acquire a house voted Tory or PHON or Clive Palmer.as the Reverend Charles Kingsley said over a hundred years ago,”They are rightly called the desrving poor”.
What is seldom discussed in the papers or indeed here, is the scandal that is the price of housing in general. In the early 80s my wife and I, just starting our careers, were able to rent in Neutral Bay, run two cars, live the life of Riley and still save for only three years for a deposit on a fixer upper in North Manly. There’s something intrinsically wrong that in this huge land with a tiny population, the price today for a similar house would now cost about a million dollars. Telephone, electricity and other costs were only a fraction of what they are today. I don’t know what can be done about it. Perhaps looking to Europe where much higher density populations can still live comfortably on low incomes, certainly they have large numbers of social housing and their rental regulations are very strict.
An overheated “pyramid scheme” section of the economy – fuelled by on-going Howard-Costello middle-class welfare legacy that is negative gearing (paid for in no small part from the taxes of “the unaffording” – unable to compete with multi-holding investors, thanks to negative gearing, for a home) – sustained under Limited News Party government.
Eventually it will burst ….. another “legacy” to compound the interest of their original.
I read that in NSW alone, available housing is about 200,000 below market demand. Until thats addressed I think prices will stay high no matter what. Given that the next 20 years are going to see massive job losses due to automation, I think the only solution is going to have to be social housing.