Luxury Apartment Spending Sky High

Sales of luxury apartments worth more than $10 million have risen nearly eightfold during the first half of 2021 when compared to the decade average according to Knight Frank research.

Ultra-rich buyers have splurged more than $650 million in Sydney alone with 67 super-prime luxury apartments changing hands around the country – a steep rise from the 8.7 average annual sales over the past 10 years. Of note, the majority of the transactions were at Crown Residences at One Barangaroo.

Knight Frank defines super-prime properties as the top 1% of each market by value. Around the country that sees a threshold of more than $10 million in Sydney and Melbourne and $7 million in Brisbane, Perth and the Gold Coast.

The recently coined ‘rightsizer’ – those downsizing from stately homes to luxury apartments – tended to target newly built or off-the-plan apartments. However, Sydney differed from the rest of the country where the lack of new stock forced buyers to look at existing builds according to Michelle Ciesielski, Knight Frank’s head of residential research.

“The surge in demand was driven by ultra-wealthy buyers looking for a low maintenance apartment with house-like proportions for entertaining, as well as those seeking a secured luxury apartment residence that can be easily locked up when they jet off for long periods of international travel again next year,” she said.

Higher demand for luxury apartments has lifted values for new apartments by 46% since June 2015 – outperforming the established apartment market which recorded a strong, 31% increase in major cities.

Sydney was the only city that didn’t follow the trend, with the older stock soaring by 48% compared to 30% for new apartments.

Ms Cieselski said apartment values should continue to rise further in the years ahead, with a falling supply forecast.

“In contrast to increasing demand, the pipeline of new apartments in prime regions around Australia will fall by 39% over the next three years across low-rise, mid-rise and high-rise projects, which will mostly be felt in Brisbane and Sydney,” she said.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

Luxury Apartment Spending Sky High

Spending on super-prime apartments has surged in the first half of 2021.

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents