Forum Replies Created
- In any case, even if I did, in an upward market, people buy and in a downward market, people consolidate or refinance.
Agreed, but the market has to move, and its a bit of a standoff out there ATM. Vendors asking too much, buyers not offering enough, properties sitting on the market for months on end. As I understand it, investor financing has dropped off dramatically, owner-occupier financing has picked up a bit, but still well down from the top.
Can you please tell me how I have a “vested interest” in the health of the property market?Well, I’m not the one with big links advertising my services in every post.
Hum, what to say to the above? So we lost 12,000 young and gained 170,000 mature and that is …. bad?Yes of course its bad to have such an imbalance. If people in the prime of their working life are leaving Sydney, who is going to buy all these overpriced houses when the baby-boomers want to sell up in 5-10 years time?
I have had to move inter-state to avoid negative nellies and drains on my personal energy.LOL! You had to leave the state?! Are you going to have to leave this forum now because of all the negative energy coming from my posts? For Christ’s sake, give me break!
your alterior motives for pushing such a negative outlookOooh yes, for the umpteenth time you mention my dark alterior motives. I’m not a investor, I don’t own any property, I’d simply like to buy a home for my family for a sane price. How sinister is that? To suggest that I am trying to influence the property market by posting here is ludicrous.
I’ll leave it for other readers to decide which of us has more of a vested interest in the health of the property market.
First let me say this would be a very boring forum if everyone was ‘positive’ (to use Robert’s terminology) and bullish on property. I enjoy being one of the few bears here, and I don’t plan on going away, no matter how much I annoy people.
Over a ten year period you will more than double your money in most major cities in Australia.That is simply isn’t true. If you’d bought in the late 80s, you wouldn’t have seen much real growth (i.e. above inflation) in ten years.
Look at this chart: http://203.26.51.178/cracker/51242_1.jpg
If you believe (as I do) that we are about 18 months past the top of an unprecedented bull run in property, people who buy now will not see much growth for a decade.
One thing I have learned from successful people is that if you surround yourself with negative people, it will bring you down.Robert, that is so much psycho-babble. Surrounding yourself with yes men is the surest route to failure. A good dose of skepticism, cynicism and questioning of the conventional wisdom will see you go further.
First of all Sydney receives an influx of some 70,000 migrants a year, so much for people leavingIts net migration that counts, if more people leave than arrive in Sydney then you have a net loss. More importantly, its young people who a leaving in droves. To quote from the Colebatch article: “(NSW) actually went backwards among the under-40s, losing a net 11,400 younger people, while gaining 167,400 of the middle-aged and elderly”
Prices go up because more people want to buy than there is on offer, so two or more people want to buy the same house and whoever pays more wins.You obviously haven’t been to any auctions in Sydney recently! I looked at a house yesterday that has sat on the market for months. They dropped their price 20% this week and I was the only person to inspect during yesterday’s open house. I reckon I could offer 20% less again confident that no-one else would outbid me.
Try owning Sydney property in the current market and you will learn something real.I did, until very recently.
Personally, I am so sick of hearing it!Well, stop replying to these threads then!
What annoys me about your constant negative posts and apparent excitement at Sydney property prices dropping is that you ignore the fact that everyone who already owns property in Sydney is going to lose big time. For every winner, there is a loser!Did it ever occur to you there are lots of losers when the market is rising as well? People boasting here about how much money they are making in WA and Qld is every bit as annoying IMO.
Besides, the market would have to fall an awful long way for there to be many losers in Sydney. Most owner-occupiers would have bought well before the boom.
Hi Dimichie Phil here, this is old news mate and Sydney has a way to go before it hits the bottom.I’m glad you agree.
I’m with Robert though, can you do a post with an opportunity to make moneyAnyone looking to buy in Sydney is saving a lot of money while the market continues to fall.
who cares about a Sydney market, people r leaving SYD in droves.People who have jobs, family and friends in Sydney.
Guess what? I have a link to a story about Sydney being our sickest city:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Business/Sydney-becomes-our-sickest-city/2005/05/15/1116095851908.htmlSydney’s real estate prices remain about three years’ average take-home pay higher than in Melbourne, almost five years’ higher than in Brisbane, and almost double average prices in Perth and Adelaide.House prices in Sydney were always higher, because Sydney is where land is most scarce. But as successive real estate booms and home renovations almost doubled the average price of a house relative to wages, the affordability gap between Sydney and the rest widened.
Even after a steep fall in prices in 2004, the Real Estate Institute and AMP Banking report that, in the December quarter, the median price in Sydney was $89,500 higher than in Melbourne, $162,500 higher than in Brisbane and $204,500 higher than in Perth.
I opened it to see if it was possible you could post something other than doom and gloom about the economy. I should have known better.But its not doom and gloom about the economy! Lower housing prices are the best thing that could possibly happen to Sydney, it might stem the tide of people leaving the city because they can’t afford anything.
WHO CARES!You do obviously. Why else would you have opened the thread?
Like nobody here cares if Australia’s largest and most influential market continues to decline month after month after month. Who are you kidding?
As Dazzling said, go to the VGO or have a friendly REA who can give You RPData
Whenever I find an agent who’s desperate to sell (and they aren’t to hard to find these days) I ask for an RP Data report for all the streets around the property I’m interested in. The point is, I shouldn’t have to!
If these other companies can gather the data from government, why not do it as well?Even if you could easily gather the data from the titles office, the prices would be 2-3 months out of date. AFAIK the titles office doesn’t record prices until a few weeks after settlement.
What we really need is a regulatory authority (preferablly nationwide) that records prices when contracts are exchanged and makes the data freely available … kinda like a stockmarket.
Problem is, there are a lot of vested interests in keeping this property bubble afloat, and you can’t have the punters knowing the true value of real estate now can you!
I asked what price the vendor paid, and she wouldn’t tell me, quoting “Everyone deserves to make a profit, even you!”.Yep, I suspect that’s the real reason. Agents don’t want to reveal prices if they are below expectations. We’ll see a lot of this as the agents try to prop up a falling market.
I’m sure they’d have no problems telling you the sale price if it was a “record sale” [biggrin]
Does it seem odd to anyone that when making the biggest single financial transaction of a lifetime there is bugger all information available? I mean, when you buy shares you have full price history going back until when the company was listed on the stock exchange. Not so when you buy a house.
How many times have you asked an agent what price a house actually sold for, and s/he says: “sorry, I can’t tell you”. It happened to me just yesterday. Drives me nuts! Why the friggin’ hell can’t they tell you?
Alan Kohler wrote about this issue last year:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/05/1083635203804.htmlThat’s because neither he nor anyone else has a clue what’s really going on in the property market.According to the ABS, finance approvals in March were 19 per cent below the October peak, while flat against February. But it’s now a week into May. Building approvals have been flat, with two big spikes, for about three years and yesterday’s figures confirmed a slightly declining trend. But within that, house approvals were higher.
Meanwhile, actual credit growth remains at record levels and median house prices have not fallen, according to the data (at least three months old).
And then there were Sydney auction clearances last weekend – down to 32.8 per cent. But auctions represent only about 20 per cent of Sydney real estate sales: 80 per cent of the market is a complete mystery. Auction volumes are down, but that’s because there are more private sales. So Australian monetary policy is being set according to a hotch-potch of out-of-date and tangential data and quarter-truths about real estate. The biggest investment decision in most people’s lives is being made on the same basis.
How can the disgraceful state of information on the property market in Australia be allowed to continue? Because no one is responsible for fixing it and almost no one has a commercial incentive to do so.
There are, in fact, two projects under way to improve the state of information about real estate, one in Canberra and one in Victoria.
In Canberra, there is http://www.allhomes.com.au, a website which is both a property listing and data publishing vehicle. As well as houses for sale, it has a free data base containing all ACT sales since 1991, by address and with descriptions of the houses. It means someone thinking about buying a house in Canberra can find out all the sales of that particular property for the past 13 years, plus all sales in the same street or suburb.
It is a fantastic service, set up by a Sydney-based internet entrepreneur named Don Collis who was house-hunting in Sydney five years ago and couldn’t believe the appalling state of information available. He hired database expert Jan Mitchell and located the venture in Canberra because the city is a more manageable size than Sydney.
The only problem with Mitchell’s website is that the information comes from the Government, which means it is based on settlements rather than sales, and that means it is 30 to 90 days old. She does collect weekly sales data from agents (about 95 per cent of Canberra agents) but doesn’t publish it until it’s checked against the government data.
In Victoria, the Real Estate Institute, led by Enzo Raimondo, is going a step further.
The REIV now collects weekly sales data from about 700 of its 748 members, but this is not available to the public, and in any case another 2000 agents in Victoria selling houses are not institute members.
The REIV is setting up a call centre to ring all Victorian agents, not just members, every weekend to collect comprehensive sales data. In about a month, Raimondo says he will launch a public website providing fully up-to-date information on every real estate transaction in the state.
The only thing missing will be the house addresses because of legal advice that it would breach federal privacy laws. Perhaps Canberra’s allhomes.com.au doesn’t breach those laws because the information is published after settlement, when it is on the public register.
I rang most other real estate institutes around Australia yesterday to see if there was any interest in following suit. Queensland is watching Victoria closely and if it works, will do the same. WA collects data from the Government and provides it to members, but not the public. ACT is working with The Canberra Times to come up with a competitor to allhomes.com.au – apparently because Jan Mitchell refused to join the institute.
The Real Estate Institute of NSW collects no data from anywhere and has no plans whatsoever to do so. Australian Property Monitors and Residex collect it from the Government after settlement and sell it.
Sorry, the quote in the previous post is from Kohler today pointing out that up until now it has been more tax effective to put money into investment properties rather than superannuation. The removal of the super surcharge redresses the balance a little, but the tax system still very much favours real estate investment.
http://smh.com.au/news/Business/Super-idea-back-to-flat-tax/2005/05/17/1116095963636.htmlBut Australia is still the only country that taxes retirement savings on the way into a fund, taxes the earnings of the fund and then taxes the money on the way out again.The effect of this is to turn superannuation into nothing more than a system of tax deferral: the real tax break for long-term saving in Australia is so minimal as to be hardly worth the trouble.
One of the side-effects of this, I’m convinced, has been the property investment boom of the past five years, as baby boomers use the greater tax advantages of negative gearing to bolster their savings.
Actually that is all directed to the general public – mainly first home owners and the over taxed hard working middle class.So you’re telling me the property industry derives no benefit whatsoever from the FHO grant, negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions, depreciation allowances etc? Well then, I’m sure the various real estate lobby groups would be in favour of abolishing all these rorts!
Over taxed as we are busy subsidising minority interest groups instead of letting the market sort things out.I couldn’t agree more. Lets abolish all the rorts and take 10cents off the income tax rate.
If you have to subsidise an exporter $2 to produce $1 of exports then there is a waste of Australian resources.Why should the Australian taxpayer pay $1 in every $2 of your interest payments?
you would need to consider the GST exclusion on staple foods to be a subsidy of farmers as wellI agree the GST should be uniform and across-the-board, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. Should there be GST on rent? GST on interest payments?
But when commodity prices are strong all the other exporters in Australia suffer.
Why should a manufacturer who is exporting a globally competitive product have his profit margin slashed (or worse go out of business) because the price of copper is high?
That’s what happens in Australia because like it or not the global markets see us as a quarry and a farm.
what good is a trade surplus??? it means you have produced a whole heap of products and you havent been paid for them.Actually no, when you have a current account surplus other countries pay you interest on the difference. Not ideal, but better than paying interest to someone else. The ideal is to have neither a deficit or a suplus.
of course a floating exchange rate eliminates the problem anywayYes, the market (eventually) punishes countries that run huge current account deficits by devaluing their currency. The only thing keeping the AUD strong is record high commodity prices and a weak greenback.
Can’t you stick all these threads in another section? I think opinionated would be more suitable.No worse than the “Equity Lending is a disgrace !!” thread I would have thought
rest of the comunity doesn’t get special treatmentLemme see, the housing industry gets the first home owners grant, negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions, generous depreciation allowances etc etc. At least the poor bloody farmers are earning this country some export income!
My favourite quote from the Colebatch article:We are not borrowing to invest in income-creating projects but in housing. We are not paying back our debts; rather, each year we borrow more.Ok, plant you head in the sand and pretend this doesn’t matter, but deep down you know it does.
Last year, America suffered a $230 billion trade deficit with China. Right now, China is licking its chops as they sell us billions in goods but buy nothing from us in return. Why? Because we’ve lost our manufacturing base which means we have nothing to sell. In fact, China aims to surpass Japan in total manufacturing output by 2015. By that time, the United States won’t have anything to sell anyone in the world. How long do we keep spending money we don’t have?All of this applies equally (if not more so) to Australia. We’re just fortunate that we can dig stuff up out of the ground that the Chinese want, and they will pay good prices (for now)
