Tag: housing affordability

A housing plan that could kill your finances

From The New Daily.

The Turnbull government’s lack of serious action on housing affordability is most obvious when one of its own MPs is calling it to account, as backbencher John Alexander did again on Monday.

Mr Alexander last year headed a government-dominated parliamentary inquiry on housing affordability that, after he’d been transferred to another inquiry, made no recommendations on housing affordability at all.

But that has not stopped the former tennis champ making a lot of noise on the subject himself. For that he should be commended.

Mr Alexander wants to keep house prices roughly where they are – what he calls “stability in the market” – but to tilt the market towards owner-occupiers rather than investors.

Well, that would be a start, but real affordability comes when house prices and wages stop diverging and start to move closer together. In an era of low inflation and low wages growth, that could take a very long time.

Among some of his more useful ideas there remains a real stinker that others, such as billionaire property developer Harry Triguboff, have raised in recent years – namely, allowing young Aussies to use their super savings to invest in their first home.

OECD warns of a ‘rout’ in house prices

That would help owner-occupiers to outbid investors, but pouring such a large amount of capital into the market would push prices even higher.

Mr Alexander told the ABC on Monday: “The most important thing … is to understand that property bought with super remains the property of your super. If you sell it, the money goes straight back into your super.

“… People aren’t getting into the market until 45, they retire at 65, then they cash in their super to pay out their house. So the money … has gone into an unassessable asset, so those people have full claim on the aged pension. They have actually used their super to buy their house.”

That sounds like a good argument, until you consider the economic context: household debt has never been higher, house prices have never been higher, and wage growth has never been slower.

In short, the super-into-housing argument comes with the standard financial product warning that ‘past performance does not guarantee future results’.

A wobbly asset class

The housing market in Australia has outperformed all other asset classes in the past two decades, but to suggest it can do so again is arguing against simple arithmetic.

Try these nonsensical arguments on a maths teacher sometime: ‘House prices can continue to outpace wages and inflation forever. Each year’s first home buyers can afford to spend a greater portion of their pay on housing. Interest rates will never rise.’

Alternatively, we can learn from the painful lesson being experienced right now in Perth, where stretched home valuations are on the decline (see chart below).

In the past 12 months, Perth house prices have fallen 5 per cent, while the ASX has risen 10.6 per cent – and that’s without counting reinvested dividends.

So a young, would-be home owner could have got themselves in quite a pickle if they’d been allowed to tip, say, $100,000 from their balanced super portfolio into the single home asset.

Their ‘super-owned’ deposit would be worth $5000 less, their home equity would be down $20,000 and a comparable super portfolio that tracked the share market would be up $11,000.

Net result: $36,000 behind. The leveraged gains of earlier years have become leveraged losses.

It’s true, of course, that in the past two decades you can find times when these numbers have been reversed.

But that was then. Young home buyers may not fully understand that now is not the time to be playing Russian roulette with super.

Superannuation fund managers are trained to maximise returns across a range of asset classes, which they trade in and out of as markets change. None would tip all of a saver’s super into a single dwelling.

There are plenty of sound ways to fix housing affordability. But at this time, more than ever, raiding super isn’t one of them.

Could 3D-Printing help solve the housing affordability problem?

From Zero Hedge.

While 3D-printing may have been faded away in recent years from the spotlight of core “disruptive” technologies, that may soon change again after a company managed to 3D-print an entire house in just 24 hours. Located in Russia, the following 400-square-foot home, or 37 square meters, was built in just a day, at a cost of slightly over $10,000.

As profiled in the Telegraph, the company Apis Cor, 3D-printing specialists based in Russia and San Francisco, built the house using a mobile printer on-site. According to the company, the walls of the building were printed and painted in just 24 hours.

What makes Apis’ process unique is that while 3D-printing a home usually involves creating the parts off-site and constructing the building later, Apis Cor uses a mobile printer to print their apartments on-site. As profiled here, in 2015 the world’s first 3D-printed apartment building was constructed in China, with the structures printed off-site.

However, the Apis process is unique in that it eliminates the need to transfer the printed blocks to the construction site.

“Printing of self-bearing walls, partitions and building envelope were done in less than a day: pure machine time of printing amounted to 24 hours,” the company said.

The main components of the house, including the walls, partitions and building envelope are printed solely with a concrete mixture. Once the house has been completed, the printer is removed with a crane-manipulator and the roof is then added, followed by the interior fixtures and furnishings, as is a layer of paint to the exterior of the house.

The total construction cost of the house: $10,134.

The initial house consists of a hallway, bathroom, living room and kitchen and is located in one of Apis Cor’s facilities in Russia. The company has claimed that the house can last up to 175 years.

Nikita Chen-yun-tai, the inventor of the mobile printer and founder of Apis Cor, explained his desire is “to automate everything”.

“When I first thought about creating my machine the world has already knew about the construction 3D printing,” he explained. “But all printers created before shared one thing in common – they were portal type. I am sure that such a design doesn’t have a future due to its bulkiness. So I took care of this limitation and decided to upgrade a construction crane design.”

He adds: “We want to help people around the world to improve their living conditions. That’s why the construction process needs to become fast, efficient and high-quality as well. For this to happen we need to delegate all the hard work to smart machines.”

Apis Cor has claimed to be the first company to have developed a 3D printer than can print whole buildings on-site.

For now the technology is in its infancy, however in a few years, the deflationary pressures unleashed by Apis-Cor and its competitors could results in a huge deflationary wave across the construction space, and would mean that a house that recently cost in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, could be built for a fraction of the cost, providing cheap, accessible housing to millions, perhaps in the process revolutionizing and upending the multi trillion-dollar mortgage business that is the bedrock of the US banking industry.

Victoria To Release Land For New Housing

The Andrews Labor Government has announced it is taking action to boost land supply and cut delays in approvals to make housing more affordable for Victorians. They will rezoning 100,000 lots within two years in key growth corridors spread in seven of Melbourne’s growth councils. They claim it will help tackle housing affordability head on.

 

The planning of these 17 new suburbs will include the services, infrastructure and amenity that are the very cornerstone of great communities.

While these plans roll out over the next two years, we’re slashing the time it takes for land to be shovel-ready.

The Streamlining for Growth program is also being extended another three years, helping councils streamline subdivision processes, unlock sites and speed up applications for residential and employment land.

This will ensure planning projects can progress without hold ups. Some 37 projects have already begun tackling the red tape that once delayed subdivision approvals from councils and utilities –saving time and money for both developers and buyers.

This will help build up a four-month stock of lots for sale in growth corridors to create a more competitive market, and ensure Victoria retains its strong land supply that underpins our affordability edge. Melbourne land prices remain around half that in Sydney, and this Government intends to hold on to that competitive edge.

The Government will also commence a pilot program to deliver 100 new social housing dwellings on government land as part of developments in established suburbs.

This pilot is part of a program so private developers can innovate to provide inclusionary housing in new developments.

The Labor Government is making record investments to give Victorian communities the resources and services they deserve, including $3.3 billion for the state’s public transport system and $1 billion in health infrastructure.

 

Invest in Urban Transport to Fix Housing Affordability

From AAP.

Soaring household debt and housing prices could make it “dangerous” to cut interest rates, the head of the Reserve Bank of Australia says.

Dr Philip Lowe has told a Federal parliamentary economics committee that a deeper cut to the official cash rate could deliver a short-term boost to jobs and inflation but also push already-high property prices and household debt levels to worrying levels.

“Is it really in the national interest to create a little bit more employment growth in the short-run at the expense of creating vulnerabilities which could be quite dangerous in the long term,” Dr Lowe said at the hearing in Sydney on Friday.

He said another rate cut could help drive down the unemployment rate, which could be lower than its current 5.7 per cent, and boost underlying inflation, which could be higher than 1.55 per cent.

RBA figures show the household debt-to-income ratio is already at 187 per cent, while total household debt is equal to about 123 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

“I accept that different people will come to different points on judging that trade-off; at the moment we’re in a reasonable place because the unemployment rate is broadly steady and household debt and house price growth at the aggregate level are fast enough,” Dr Lowe said.

“I feel if they were even faster at the moment we would be moving into the area where the vulnerabilities are increasing, perhaps to unacceptable levels.”

Lower housing prices and household debt levels would only marginally strengthen the case for another rate cut, he said.

The central bank chief said monetary policy alone could no longer drive growth and it was up to the Parliament to use fiscal policy — through changes to tax and spending — to support the economy.

“Monetary policy at the margin can help you, but were talking very much at the margin,” he said.

The best way the Government could reduce pressure on property prices and boost growth would be investing in urban transport infrastructure, he said.

He said with a growing population, crowded cities, poor land supply and the difficulties people encounter moving around, investment in urban transport infrastructure would be “a first order gain”.

“It increases demand, takes the pressure off ultra-low interest rates, increases the productive capacity of the economy because people can move around, it takes the pressure off housing prices,” Dr Lowe.

“It’s probably the best housing affordability policy.”

Tackling housing unaffordability: a 10-point national plan

From The Conversation

The widening cracks in Australia’s housing system can no longer be concealed. The extraordinary recent debate has laid bare both the depth of public concern and the vacuum of coherent policy to promote housing affordability. The community is clamouring for leadership and change.

Especially as it affects our major cities, housing unaffordability is not just a problem for those priced out of a decent place to live. It also damages the efficiency of the entire urban economy as lower paid workers are forced further from jobs, adding to costly traffic congestion and pushing up unemployment.

There have recently been some positive developments at the state level, such as Western Australia’s ten year commitment to supply 20,000 affordable homes for low and moderate income earners. Meanwhile, following South Australia’s lead, Victoria plans to mandate affordable housing targets for developments on public land. And in March the NSW State Premier announced a fund to generate $1bn in affordable housing investment.

But although welcome, these initiatives will not turn the affordability problem around while tax settings continue to support existing homeowners and investors at the expense of first time buyers and renters. Moreover, apart from a brief interruption 2008-2012, the Commonwealth has been steadily winding back its explicit housing role for more than 20 years.

The post of housing minister was deleted in 2013, and just last month Government senators dismissed calls for renewed Commonwealth housing policy leadership recommended by the Senate’s extensive (2013-2015) Affordable Housing Inquiry. This complacency cannot go unchallenged.

Challenging the “best left to the market” mantra

The mantra adopted by Australian governments since the 1980s that housing provision is “best left to the market” will not wash. Government intervention already influences the housing market on a huge scale, especially through tax concessions to existing property owners, such as negative gearing. Unfortunately, these interventions largely contribute to the housing unaffordability problem rather than its solution.

But first we need to define what exactly constitutes the housing affordability challenge. In reality, it’s not a single problem, but several interrelated issues and any strategic housing plan must specifically address each of these.

Firstly, there is the problem faced by aspiring first home buyers contending with house prices escalating ahead of income growth in hot urban housing markets. The intensification of this issue is clear from the reduced home ownership rate among young adults from 53% in 1990 to just 34% in 2011 – a decline only minimally offset by the entry of well-off young households into the housing market as first-time investors.

Secondly, there is the problem of unaffordability in the private rental market affecting tenants able to keep arrears at bay only by going without basic essentials, or by tolerating unacceptable conditions such as overcrowding or disrepair. Newly published research shows that, by 2011, more than half of Australia’s low income tenants – nearly 400,000 households – were in this way being pushed into poverty by unaffordable rents.

Thirdly, there is the long-term decline in public housing and the public finance affordability challenge posed by the need to tackle this. In NSW, for example, 30-40% of all public housing is officially sub-standard.

“Why the “build more houses” approach won’t work

A factor underlying all these issues is the long-running tendency of housing construction numbers to lag behind household growth. But while action to maximise supply is unquestionably part of the required strategy, it is a lazy fallacy to claim that the solution is simply to ‘build more homes’.

Even if you could somehow double new construction in (say) 2016, this would expand overall supply of properties being put up for sale in that year only very slightly. More importantly, the growing inequality in the way housing is occupied (more and more second homes and underutilised homes) blunts any potential impact of extra supply in moderating house prices. Re-balancing demand and supply must surely therefore involve countering inefficient housing occupancy by re-tuning tax and social security settings.

Where maximising housing supply can directly ease housing unaffordability is through expanding the stock of affordable rental housing for lower income earners. Not-for-profit community housing providers – the entities best placed to help here – have expanded fast in recent years. But their potential remains constrained by the cost and terms of loan finance and by their ability to secure development sites.

Housing is different to other investment assets

Fundamentally, one of the reasons we’ve ended up in our current predicament is that the prime function of housing has transitioned from “usable facility” to “tradeable commodity and investment asset”. Policies designed to promote home ownership and rental housing provision have morphed into subsidies expanding property asset values.

Along with pro-speculative tax settings, this changed perception about the primary purpose of housing has inflated the entire urban property market. The OECD rates Australia as the fourth or fifth most “over-valued” housing market in the developed world. Property values have become detached from economic fundamentals; a longer term problem exaggerated by the boom of the past three years. As well as pushing prices beyond the reach of first home buyers, this also undermines possible market-based solutions by swelling land values which damage rental yields, undermining the scope for affordable housing. Moreover, this places Australia among those economies which, in OECD-speak, are “most vulnerable to a price correction”.

While moderated property prices could benefit national welfare, no one wants to trigger a price crash. Rather, governments need to face up to the challenge of managing a “soft landing” by phasing out the tax system’s economically and socially unjustifiable market distortions and re-directing housing subsidies to progressive effect.

A 10-point plan for improved housing affordability

Underpinned by a decade’s research on fixing Australia’s housing problems, we therefore propose the following priority actions for Commonwealth, State and Territory governments acting in concert:

  • Moderate speculative investment in housing by a phased reduction of existing tax incentives favouring rental investors (concessional treatment of negative gearing and capital gains tax liability)
  • Redirect the additional tax receipts accruing from reduced concessions to support provision of affordable rental housing at a range of price points and to offer appropriate incentives for prospective home buyers with limited means.
  • By developing structured financing arrangements (such as housing supply bonds backed by a government guarantee), actively engage with the super funds and other institutional players who have shown interest in investing in rental housing
  • Replace stamp duty (an inefficient tax on mobility) with a broad-based property value tax (a healthy incentive to fully utilise property assets)
  • Expand availability of more affordable hybrid ‘partial ownership’ tenures such as shared equity – to provide ‘another rung on the ladder’
  • Implement the Henry Tax Review recommendations on enhancing Rent Assistance to improve affordability for low income tenants especially in the capital city housing markets where rising rents have far outstripped the value of RA payments.
  • Reduce urban land price gradients (compounding housing inequity and economic segregation) by improving mass transit infrastructure and encouraging targeted regional development to redirect growth
  • Continue to simplify landuse planning processes to facilitate housing supply while retaining scope for community involvement and proper controls on inappropriate development
  • Require local authorities to develop local housing needs assessments and equip them with the means to secure mandated affordable housing targets within private housing development projects over a certain size
  • Develop a costed and funded plan for existing public housing to see it upgraded to a decent standard and placed on a firm financial footing within 10 years.

While not every interest group would endorse all of our proposals, most are widely supported by policymakers, academics and advocacy communities, as well as throughout the affordable housing industry. As the Senate Inquiry demonstrated beyond doubt, an increasingly dysfunctional housing system is exacting a growing toll on national welfare. This a policy area crying out for responsible bipartisan reform.

States drag feet on affordable housing, with Victoria the worst

From The Conversation.

Moral panic over recent increases in visibly homeless people in central Melbourne has brought to the fore the critical shortage of affordable housing across the metropolitan areas of Australia’s wealthiest cities. But living on the street is only the tip of the iceberg. Many more households are living in insecure and/or overpriced accommodation. Their plight is due to an undersupply of appropriately priced, sized and situated rental housing.

The Commonwealth government is reportedly planning to scrap the National Affordable Housing Agreement with the states. Without a clear alternative, the weakness of state policies, which lack clear targets and mechanisms for providing more and better affordable housing, adds to the problem. One state, Victoria, still doesn’t have an affordable housing strategy.

South Australia’s strategy has 15% inclusionary zoning as one of several mechanisms to achieve affordable housing targets. Western Australia provides regular progress updates on the regional targets of its Affordable Housing Strategy 2010-2020. Tasmania adopted a ten-year strategy in 2015.

New South Wales has had affordable housing policies in place since 2009. The NSW government has a new plan to build more social housing and improve existing stock. Queensland released a draft strategy in March 2016.

While these state policies vary in their success, Victoria does not even have a strategy to critique.

Victoria’s toxic planning legacy

No doubt Premier Daniel Andrews inherited several industrial-strength cans of toxic planning waste when Victorian Labor won office in November 2014. This legacy came not only from the Liberals, but from the earlier Bracks-Brumby Labor government.

Under the 2000s Labor government, the fourth new metropolitan strategy in four decades, Melbourne 2030, largely failed to stop sprawl. The main excuse for sprawl – that increased and largely unregulated housing supply would magically enable affordability – had become a sad joke.

As former Labor adviser Joel Deane’s book Catch and Kill shows, inability to respond to basic public concerns about planning and transport was perhaps the most significant factor in Labor’s 2010 election defeat.

If Labor had been ineffective in creating new affordable housing, the Liberals’ planning decisions between 2010 and 2014 were disastrous. Australia’s largest urban renewal site – Fishermans Bend – was drastically up-zoned from Industrial to Capital City (also known as “Anything Goes”). They did this without extracting a cent in added value from landowners towards affordable housing – or any other infrastructure.

Huge parts of the southeastern suburbs – Liberal strongholds – were essentially walled off from new housing, even though these had some of the best school and transport infrastructure to serve a rapidly growing population. Hundreds of job cuts meant the civil service lost experience and capacity to do better.

A long wait for action on affordable housing

The Victorian Labor 2014 election platform stated:

All Victorians have a right to safe, affordable and secure housing.

Yet in more than two years since its election, the Labor government has not completed any of the major reforms that would enable affordable housing.

Plan Melbourne’s “refresh” has not been published in its final form. The Residential Tenancies Act still has to be strengthened. The residential zone review hasn’t been completed.

Perhaps most disturbingly, we are still waiting for the results of the early announcement that the state treasurer was going to work with the planning and housing ministers to develop an integrated affordable housing strategy.

A new advisory body, Infrastructure Victoria, published a 30-Year Infrastructure Strategy in December 2016. “Social housing” (public and non-profit) was one of its top three priorities. However, compared with principles of “a good plan”, the affordable housing section of this strategy does not pass the test.

According to the literature on plan analysis, good plans should have seven elements: a clear vision; specific goals; a fact base informing alternatives; a spatialised sense of what goes where; a very specific implementation plan, with costs, timelines and responsible authorities; a monitoring and evaluation plan; and specific horizontal (across all parts of government, the private sector and civil society) and vertical (alignment between national, state and local government) integration.

Vancouver shows how to do it

The City of Vancouver’s Housing and Homelessness Strategy 2012-2021 is an example of an affordable housing plan that ticks the boxes. It has a clear vision embodied in the strategy’s subtitle:

A home for everyone.

The strategy sets specific numeric housing targets. These cover everything from supportive housing for homeless people with mental disabilities, to social housing, market rental and home-ownership options.

These targets are based on a robust and transparent analysis of housing trends across the city. While all subsequent neighbourhood plans are intended to achieve a mix of dwelling cost and size, there is a particular emphasis on locating supportive housing near areas with significant homeless populations.

Vancouver has shown what a comprehensive affordable housing strategy can achieve. Kenny Louie/flickr, CC BY

The partnerships with other levels of government, private developers and non-profit providers are comprehensive. A new Vancouver Affordable Housing Authority has been established to coordinate these efforts. Since the report’s adoption, further mechanisms such as a community land trust have been established. Annual reporting against the targets is available on the City of Vancouver’s website.

In contrast, Infrastructure Victoria is an advisory body to state government, not an implementation agency. Its vision of a “thriving, connected and sustainable Victoria where everyone can access good jobs, education and services” begs the question of how progress towards these attributes would be measured.

Infrastructure Victoria does estimate an extra 30,000 affordable homes are needed over the next ten years. But it admits this figure is not well justified, due to a lack of good information on affordable housing deficits.

It recommends further work on an affordable housing plan with specific funding streams. However, this cannot really be expected to be the plan that “tackles [the] affordable housing shortage”, as its own website boasted of the draft report.

At best, Infrastructure Victoria’s plan is a baby step. It does clearly state the importance of social housing as critical infrastructure. It also begins to justify mechanisms that could achieve some scaling up of affordable housing outcomes.

But the public housing waiting list now has more than 35,000 names. About 120,000 households receiving Commonwealth Rent Assistance are still unable to afford living where they do. That includes 50,000 households in the lowest income bracket. And another one million new households are expected to move into Victoria within the 30-year timeframe of the infrastructure strategy.

This all means that baby steps will not be enough to prevent rapidly increasing homelessness.

Author: Carolyn Whitzman , Professor of Urban Planning, University of Melbourne

Why housing supply shouldn’t be the only policy tool politicians cling to

From The Conversation.

The most popular government policy at the moment for solving housing affordability continues to be increasing housing supply. After a visit to the UK to look at this very problem, Treasurer Scott Morrison said:

The issue here fundamentally is about supply.

And it’s little wonder the government dwells so much on this argument. Rising house prices are very popular amongst Australian households, the majority of which are owners. And stamp duties on housing transactions are key sources of income for state governments. Our research found the default position for politicians is to sound concerned about housing affordability, but do nothing.

The supply refrain has all the hallmarks of a good policy for a politician. Increasing housing supply – rather than reducing the tax breaks that stimulate excessive demand – is a popular policy with peak property groups. The Property Council has been saying the same thing for years, so the supply solution has come to sound like fact.

If the supply doesn’t flow or, as is occurring now, doesn’t cool prices, the federal government can blame the states for sluggish planning and land supply without having to put their money where their mouth is. States in turn can blame recalcitrant local governments for blocking housing development and “gold-plating” infrastructure requirements. Since the private sector almost wholly funds and delivers new housing, calling for more of it has been a pretty cheap strategy for government.

It’s true that increasing the supply of new homes in line with population and economic growth is a fundamental part of maintaining a healthy housing system. But to tout new housing production as the only policy lever without examining the question of demand is clearly an ineffective policy position.

The supply argument sounds believable – increasing supply will actually reduce prices in markets for most types of goods, like bananas, cars or televisions. Unfortunately, the housing market is different.

Why are housing markets different?

So why is it that despite record supply levels in Australia in recent years, prices have continued to rise in Sydney and Melbourne? We think there are a number of reasons.

New supply is a small fraction of the total stock of dwellings (about 2% in Australia). Prices are set by the total housing market – most of which already exists in the form of established homes.

Also housing is an unusual good in that as prices increase, demand in the short term actually increases (it’s an asset market). This makes it much more difficult for supply increases to reduce prices.

Increasing prices feeds demand

In most other markets increasing prices both encourage extra supply and reduce demand, so these two key forces are working together – prices in these markets come down sharply when supply increases. In housing markets these two forces are working against each other – the growth of investor demand is simply swamping new supply.

The very low interest rates on offer at the moment are exacerbating this trend.

Developers manage supply

Developers, and the banks that fund development, simply won’t allow supply to get ahead of demand in a way that would put significant downward pressure on prices. Dwelling approvals in Sydney and Melbourne are running way ahead of building starts, but housing projects are released in stages to avoid swamping the market. Since our major banks have the majority of their loan books in retail mortgages, it’s no wonder they avoid funding enough supply to increase their own risk levels.

How much new supply would improve affordability anyway?

Even if Australia’s developers and financiers were less cautious, it’s probably not feasible to produce enough supply to really knock prices around when demand is very strong.

For example, prior to the global financial crisis, Ireland – which is about the same size as Sydney, increased supply to 90,000 dwellings per year (Sydney does about 30,000 dwellings per year) and prices still kept rising. It wasn’t the over-supply of homes that caused Irish house prices to fall dramatically but rather the sudden contraction of demand when the global financial crisis hit.

Under more stable conditions, the problem of generating additional housing supply remains. Australia’s prime minister has encouraged the states to fix their planning laws to make it easier get housing approvals and building to flow.

But there has been a continuous wave of planning reform over the last 10 years in Australia, and Sydney and Melbourne dwelling approvals are at long-term highs. For example, in 2015-16, Sydney recorded over 56,000 new dwelling approvals and Melbourne over 57,000.

In fact, approvals are running at about double the actual dwelling construction levels, so “fixing” the planning system is unlikely to have much impact on dwelling supply levels.

High-density supply fuels land speculation

Much new supply is in apartments. In the rush to create new supply, some local councils and state governments have provided bonuses to developers by allowing, at no charge, more apartments on a site. Land owners have seen this behaviour and are likely to increase land prices on the assumption that this will always happen. So, in this case, more supply (through additional apartments) may have actually increased prices not reduced them.

The global ‘financialisation’ of housing

Demand has increased because the focus for many housing investors is now not the cash flow generated by rents but the value of a house as a financial product. For example, at the moment there is continued strong demand for housing by investors despite the fact that apartment rents have started to decrease in Sydney and are flat in Melbourne.

The internet, and the global real estate market it helps support, enables national and international investors to be an increasingly important part of the market. They increase demand pressures in the best-performing (in terms of price growth) cities of Sydney and Melbourne by “soaking” up the new supply.

If politicians were serious about the affordability crisis, they would be trying to support the important but underfunded affordable housing sector. Better targeting tax breaks towards new and affordable rental housing, rather than fuelling demand for existing homes, would also help. But until our politicians can see past supply slogans we can expect very little policy change.

Authors: Chair of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Sydney;Professor – Urban and Regional Planning, University of Sydney

 

How renting can fix the UK’s broken housing market

From The Conversation.

How to fix the UK’s housing crisis has been the subject of national debate for decades. Universal home ownership is a popular goal, which successive governments have failed to achieve. This is largely because they have been faced with the paradox of increasing the supply of affordable housing while not encouraging house prices to fall, as this is widely regarded as political suicide.

One solution has been to promote policies that make it easier to get a mortgage or boost disposable income so that it rises faster than house prices. In fact, nearly ten years after a global financial crisis caused by the ready availability of mortgages to households with no ability to repay them, the UK government maintains its “Help to Buy” initiatives. These focus on helping people to borrow the large sums necessary to pay for unaffordable homes.

What has been missing from the debate is the role that renting can play in solving the UK’s housing problems. The government’s latest white paper is significant in that it features policies to help renters. But ownership remains the ultimate goal.

In the UK there is social and political pressure for people to “get a foot on the housing ladder” – even when, in many cases, it is financially preferable for households to rent. Although the benefits of home ownership are many, one should ask whether it is wise for governments to encourage – and subsidise – people to take on debt that they would otherwise not be able to afford, in order for them to place all of their financial resources into an asset that may be overvalued or unsuitable.

Must you get on the ladder? shutterstock.com

Eggs in one basket

One of the most basic rules of investment is “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Yet most households do just that when they buy a home and then they leverage this investment by borrowing money.

This is much riskier than placing all of your money in a fund that tracks the global stock market. Not only is it difficult to sell a house when you urgently need the money, if house prices fall – even by a not unusual 10% – your losses will be multiplied by the gearing effect of the mortgage. For example, if all of your savings amount to £20,000 and you use this as a 10% deposit to buy a £200,000 home, then you borrow the remaining £180,000, a 10% price fall will leave you with no savings and owing money to the bank if you then try to sell.

For previous generations, from the late 1970s onwards, the risk of homeownership has paid a commensurately high return because inflation has been generally positive but benign. And, at the same time, interest rates have trended down from double digits towards zero.

For those contemplating buying their first home today, however, the outlook for both interest rates and inflation is more uncertain. For example, Japan and more recently some eurozone countries have experienced prolonged periods of deflation. In the UK, despite efforts to keep inflation positive, actual realised inflation has been consistently below the Bank of England’s forecasts from the second quarter of 2013 until January.

Don’t bet on inexorable rises. shutterstock.com

House prices vary substantially over time relative to both GDP and household income – confirming that housing is a risky investment. Furthermore, in markets where building land is in short supply (such as Japan and many parts of the UK), this variability is greater than in markets such as the US where it is more readily available to meet demand.

When renting is better

In a recent paper I demonstrate that renting can be a better financial option than buying in a number of circumstances. These include: if you do not plan to live in the same house for at least five to ten years; or if inflation is negative (deflation); or if the net rent saved by owning is less than your mortgage interest or the return you could have achieved by putting your money in other investments with a similar level of risk.

This is because rent typically includes substantial ownership costs such as building insurance, property maintenance and furnishing. So the money saved by owning a house is considerably less than the rent not paid. Another reason is that buying and selling houses incurs substantial transaction costs in the form of legal fees, transaction tax (stamp duty) and selling agents’ fees. These are much higher than rental transaction costs. So unless you plan to stay in the new home for a considerable time, the chances are that these higher costs will not be recouped by savings from rent or price appreciation.

Plus, although prices have tended to drift up in the long term, prices can and do fluctuate substantially in the medium term (five to ten years). So if you plan to relocate within a few years there is a greater risk of being unlucky in your timing and suffering a price loss.

Finally, purchasing a home fixes your housing costs and often incurs a substantial mortgage liability. This is good if prices and wages are generally rising – because the mortgage payments become more affordable as incomes rise. But, in a world of low inflation or deflation, mortgage liabilities remain fixed, but incomes, prices and rents tend to decline making it harder to sustain mortgage payments and harder to recoup the capital invested in buying.

There are many ways that governments can influence the affordability of housing besides helping financially constrained households to concentrate all of their savings into risky assets that they would not otherwise be able to afford. Allowing house prices to drop will always be politically difficult – homeowners tend to make up the bulk of the electorate that turns out to vote. But they could do much more to encourage renting, even if it does require a radical rethink in the British mindset when it comes to home ownership.

Author: Isaac Tabner, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Director of the MSc in Finance, University of Stirling

 

 

Rates on hold, but housing affordability remains ‘hotly debated’

From The Real Estate Conversation.

The Reserve Bank has left interest rates at historic lows as economic conditions improve, but the property industry says other measures are required to improve housing affordability.

The Reserve Bank of Australia left interest rates on hold at its first meeting of 2017, with rates held at a record low of 1.50 per cent.

Governor Philip Lowe noted in his statement that growth in China was stronger in the second half of 2016, that global business and consumer confidence is improving, and that global inflation is rising. He also said recent rises in commodity prices are increasing Australia’s national income.

Lowe said the RBA expects Australian economic growth in the final quarter of 2016 to firm, and re-affirmed the RBA is forecasting growth to pick up to “around 3% over the next couple years”. Lowe said Australian inflation is heading back towards the target range.

In his November 2016 statement, Lowe said cutting rates further may not be in the “public interest” if it further increased household debt.

Real Estate Institute of New South Wales President John Cunningham said the central bank’s decision was no surprise, but said he expects housing affordability to be “hotly debated” this year.

“An emphasis will again be placed on first homebuyers and there will be much debate this year on ways to improve their plight,” he said.

“A review of stamp duty is urgently required and should focus on first homebuyers and older Australians,” said Cunningham.

The RBA cut interest rates twice in 2016, first in May and then in August. However, banks are independently increasing interest rates for investors as increased global economic uncertainty raises their borrowing costs.

Laing+Simmons managing director and REINSW president-elect Leanne Pilkington echoed Cunningham’s sentiment, saying rate cuts are not the answer to improving housing affordability. Further rate cuts are not required in the current housing cycle, she said.

“Obtaining housing finance at attractive terms is already possible for those with the means,” said Pilkington.

“It’s those without the means – stuck in the rental cycle or unable to accumulate a suitable deposit – that face the greatest challenge in the market,” Pilkington said.

“Further rate cuts are not a solution to the problem. Between government and the industry, we need to table some alternative solutions to help people buy their first home,” she said.

“From a housing industry perspective,” said Pilkington, “rates are already low and have been for some time, so that piece of the affordability puzzle is in place.”

Like Cunningham, Pilkington believes changes to stamp duty are necessary to address housing affordability problems. “It’s through other avenues like stamp duty reform that improvements in affordability need to be addressed,” she said.

Pilkington also said making downsizing more viable for older Australians, introducing a Government-backed savings scheme to help people save for a deposit, and minimising the cost of mortgage insurance could all alleviate housing affordability problems in Australia.

The Property Council of Australia welcomed the statement by Lowe on interest rates, saying it was a sober assessment of housing markets.

The governor’s statement said “conditions in the housing market vary considerably around the country”.

Ken Morrison, chief executive of the Property Council of Australia, said the statement confirms the current situation of “prudent lending practices and the best environment for renters in a generation with consistent low rental growth.”

“The deterioration in housing affordability is a serious problem in a number of our major cities, but is not an Australia-wide problem,” said Morrison.

1300 HomeLoan managing director John Kolenda said the RBA will remain on the sidelines until uncertainty about the economic impact of US president Trump becomes clearer.

“The RBA will stay on the sidelines and assess the impact on the global economy although our domestic economy appears stable with no need to adjust interest rates,” said Kolenda.

Kolenda said while the RBA’s cash rate is unlikely to change in the short term, confusion could arise from varying mortgage rates, and reinforced his recommendation to use a mortgage broker.