Luxury Homes Continue To Jump In Sales And Price Growth
Prices rose 9.1% across the country in the third quarter of 2021, with Sydney registering the biggest gains.
Prices rose 9.1% across the country in the third quarter of 2021, with Sydney registering the biggest gains.
Australia’s major cities continue to see robust growth in the luxury residential market, according to a report from Knight Frank released Tuesday.
There were 1,971 prime sales—the top 5% of homes in a market—recorded in the third quarter of 2021, a 119% rise compared to the same time in 2020, according to data from the estate agency. The sales number is the second-highest on record.
Australia’s Gold Coast, an area south of Brisbane on the country’s east coast, saw the biggest spike in sales in the third quarter, up 156% annually, followed by Brisbane itself, where sales jumped 135%, according to the report.
In addition, the average number of days a prime property stayed on the market in Australia was 105 in the third quarter, down from 114 days during the second quarter.
Meanwhile, prices for luxury properties across the country rose 9.1% year over year in the third quarter, the figures show. Quarter over quarter, prime prices ticked up 1.5%.
“Australia’s prime annual growth was led by Sydney (10.7%), Gold Coast (10.5%) and Perth (10.4%),” according to the report. “Brisbane followed (8.4%), then Melbourne (6.5%).”
Prices are expected to have grown as much as 11% by the end of 2021, and another 8% in 2022, the report said.
Rents have also increased across Australia, and the country saw a 5.2% year-over-year increase in rates in the third quarter, the data showed. Perth saw the largest growth, registering an annual jump of 11.8% between June and September.
Reprinted by permission of Mansion Global, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: January 18, 2022.
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This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents
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.
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