Australian Housing

MANY families are spending more than half their gross household income on paying debts, credit gatherer Veda Advantage says. It found 1.3 million of us spent more than half of the gross household income on paying debts, while 1.8 million spent more than 40 per cent on debt repayments. » …

HOMEOWNERS making a final desperate grab to save their homes from repossession are raiding their superannuation at an alarming rate, new figures show. More than $175 million was released from super funds last year to help homeowners pay their mortgages. » Stressed homeowners raiding super – news.com, 8th May 2008

INFLATION is rising at its fastest rate on record as petrol prices reach fresh heights, a leading private sector indicator shows. Economists say an interest rate cut by Christmas is now looking less likely, as price pressures persist. » Inflation rises at record pace – news.com, 5th May 2008

After hearing Real Estate agents and Property Investors for years say, House prices only go up – the opposite has happened : Rising interest rates have had a significant impact on Melbourne’s property prices in the past three months. The median house price dropped 8.4 per cent – the biggest …

INFLATION has leapt to a 16-year high and is accelerating towards 5 per cent, raising the chance of further interest rate increases. The Reserve Bank of Australia was braced for a bad inflation figure, but the 4.2 per cent jump in the headline figure for the year to March surpassed …

FOR more than 50 years the average Australian was able to buy their first home on the average wage. Traditionally, the median house price was about three times the median household income. Today, in Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane, the median house price is more than six times the median income; …

NOW THAT the season of finger-pointing over the home-loan crisis is in full swing, it’s a good time to take a look at how “house lust”, as author Daniel McGinn calls it, affected the property market. . . . Home equity fell to about 48 per cent of total household …

Page 6 of Today’s Australian Financial Report states : House prices in Perth has suffered their biggest quarterly fall in almost a decade, in what analysis say could be a sign of things to come in other cities as rising interest rates and the falling stock market take their toll. …

If a picture is worth a thousand words, today’s graph would suggest I don’t have to write a column this week. The graph was put together by the Reserve Bank’s head of economic analysis, Anthony Richards, and tracks the movement in house prices over the past 35 years compared with …

For the first time since its reporting began, AFG, Australia’s largest mortgage broker, has shown that mortgage sales in WA fell every month for the first three months of the year, when compared to sales for the same three months of 2007. This sales contraction is unprecedented in AFG’s experience: …

SYDNEY house prices could fall by as much as 30 per cent in the next two years, economists say. They warned the pain will not be confined to Sydney’s struggling south and west, where prices have already dropped dramatically. “In Sydney, a typical house will cost 8.4 times a typical …

AUSTRALIA’S overvalued housing markets and high levels of debt put it at risk of being hit by the financial tsunami swamping markets in the United States, the International Monetary Fund has warned. The IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability report, released overnight, estimates that losses to banks, borrowers, investors and other …

THE risk of a correction in Australian house prices is high by international standards, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says. The IMF, which says Australian property is among the most overvalued in the developed world, has warned that about 25 per cent of the increase in house prices between 1997 …

Property Analyst Residex, has reported just over 1/3 of residential properties in Melbourne and Sydney has taken a dive, while over in Perth the number is closer to half. Some 34 per cent of Sydney homes declined in value, Melbourne 35 per cent and Perth 55 per cent. Outside of …

The first signs of mortgage stress caused by higher interest rates and the fall in the stock market are beginning to be seen in the more affluent suburbs of Sydney. Homeowners in suburbs such as Bondi, Chatswood and on the northern beaches are feeling the pinch as their net worth …

Australian consumer sentiment slumped to its lowest in more than 14 years in March as rising interest rates fanned worries over the economy, a survey showed on Wednesday. The Westpac-Melbourne Institute consumer sentiment index dropped 9.1% in March to 88.6, the lowest reading since September, 1993. That was the third …

THE economy is headed for recession next year, with a 50 per cent plunge in share values and a double-digit drop in house prices – that’s what one analyst says. » Australia ‘on verge of recession’ – news.com.au, March 10th 2008

AUSTRALIA’S financial institutions have lent billions of dollars to home buyers who were not subject to basic credit checks and had a history of defaults, putting them in the “sub-prime” category that continues to terrorise world financial markets.The revelation, contained in research conducted by Dun & Bradstreet exclusively for The …

HOMEOWNERS in Sydney’s outer suburbs have been losing as much as $450 a week every week since early 2004 on the value of their properties as the real story of mortgage belt misery begins to emerge. Since the peak of the boom in early 2004, Sydney’s southern suburbs has dipped …