Australia property - bubble or squeak?

In our very first podcast, we chat to David Kobritz, Managing Director of Deal Corp. He’s been involved in the residential, retail and commercial building business for more than 30 years. We also hear from Daniel Gradwell who is our senior economist in Melbourne and our property specialist. Our host is Darren Thomson from ANZ’s communications team.
 

KEY HIGHLIGHTS:

Daniel Gradwell: “If we're thinking about the broader Australian market, Melbourne in particular still looks to be pretty resilient; prices are still increasing month after month. If you look around some of the other places like Sydney it used to be the key driver of price growth over the last few years. But it looks like that market has really started to slow down over the last few months.

“Even in places that were driven by the mining boom to start with - the likes of Western Australia and Northern Territory - prices are very much in negative territory and it looks like that's still got a bit further to go.

“Population growth is driving a lot of the demand for housing. Over the last year Victoria's population increased by about 150,000 people which sounds like a big number and it really is, it's the fastest increase in population that we've seen across any state in Australia throughout our entire history. To put that into a bit of perspective it's more than three times faster than that 20 year average that we had through to the mid 2000s.”

David Kobritz: “I think Melbourne has proven that it's such a wonderful city to live in and that's extremely attractive for both interstate and overseas migration hence the very high levels of migration into Victoria and particularly Melbourne over the past decade. As such the industry has found it almost impossible to keep supply up with demand both in terms of stock for purchases whether they be investors or owner occupiers and rental stock as well. Rental vacancies are down at around 1 1/2 percent of stock levels presently and that's likely to stay in that sort of range in the near or medium future.

“We've got strong overseas migration but also the interstate flows as well. So Victoria in particular is benefiting from the end of the mining boom in places like Western Australia and even some parts of regional Queensland as well. People are coming back to the cities where they were originally from and we're seeing very strong outflows from those parts back into places like Sydney and Melbourne.

“The positive thing for Melbourne is quite apart from the strong population growth that's likely to continue the supply side is really struggling to keep pace.”

In our next podcast we hear from Senior Economist Cherelle Murphy who speaks to two of our Perth clients and asks them if the economy's green shoots are robust?