A hot spring selling season forecast as property market roars back to life
Real estate leader says strong sales last month point to a busy season ahead
2 min
Ray White boss Dan White is forecasting a bumper spring selling season for Australia’s property market, after the real estate company wrote a staggering $6.9 billion in sales last month.
August’s stellar result was 14 percent higher than the same month last year and only four percent down on 2021 when record home price growth was seen.
“Our August sales results officially certified the renewed and broad-based resurgence in the residential market that we have been seeing since late May,” Mr White said.
May was when Ray White saw a small “but identifiable” lift in new listings coming to market, particularly in the eastern states, he said.
“This was very unusual as new listings normally drop in the winter months. Interest rates were still rising, and given that the expectation was for an increasingly depressed market, was this a blip? But the trend became firmer in June, and stronger again in July.”
Ray White Group listed 10,500 homes in August, up 12 percent on last year and more than 20 percent higher than 2021.
And Mr White revealed the company’s pre-listing data shows a “strong” flow of more listings in the next few weeks.
“Buyers, including potential sellers that intend to repurchase, now have a lot more property to choose from. The market is very well-stocked for spring.”
Despite an increase in supply, buyer demand remains elevated across much of the country, meaning prices are likely to continue rising in the months ahead.
CoreLogic’s latest Home Value Index, released this week, shows home prices nationally inched upwards by 0.8 percent in August – the sixth consecutive month of growth.
Since bottoming out in February, prices at a national level are 4.9 per cent higher, adding $34,000 to the median value of a dwelling.
Sydney has led the recovery trend, with a gain of 8.8% since values found a floor in the Harbour City in January, while Brisbane has also seen values up 6.2% since bottoming out in February.
Ray White’s Lower North Shore Group posted $216 million in sales in August while Ray White Quakers Hill sold 135 homes.
Mr White is expecting the coming months – traditionally the busiest in real estate – to be just as busy.
“There will be enough stock to record some big results – maybe not at 2021 levels but not too far off,” he said. “So much depends of course on the broader economic sentiment and how that influences buyer behaviour.”
One likely driver of sustained buyer confidence is the decision this week by the Reserve Bank to leave interest rates on hold, which has led many economists to believe the tightening cycle is on hold for now.
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The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
3 min
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
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