Strong Markets Hold The Line
Sellers return to the housing auction market in significant numbers.
Sellers return to the housing auction market in significant numbers.
The national auction market continued to record strong results at the weekend despite the usual increase in mid-spring listings which, this year, has been amplified by the end of lockdowns in major capital cities.
The national clearance rate was higher at the weekend – up to 84.7% from 83.9% and well above the 77.3% reported over the same weekend last year.
National auction numbers were higher again at the weekend, rising from the previous Saturday’s 1970 to 2048 – ahead of the 1083 auctioned over the same weekend last year.
Although the market continues to record boomtime results, Sydney’s weekend auction market was sharply lower at the weekend recording a clearance rate of 77.0% — below the previous weekend’s 83.6% and lower than the 78.8% recorded over the same weekend last year.
It marks the first time the NSW capital’s clearance has fallen below 80% for the first time in 12 weeks.
Higher auction numbers have impacted clearance rates with 721 homes listed for auction at the weekend – up from 677 the previous weekend and 637 for the same weekend in 2020.
Sydney recorded a median price of $1,685,000 for houses sold at auction at the weekend – marginally higher than the $1,675,000 reported over the previous Saturday and 22.5% higher than the $1,375,000 recorded over the same weekend last year.
With the city coming out of lockdown, Melbourne’s fortunes shifted with the city recording a clearance rate of 80.4% on Saturday – higher than the previous weekend’s 77% and the first time its result has eclipsed Sydney’s since early July.
A total of 994 homes were listed for auction at the weekend – similar to the 993 reported over the previous weekend and well above the 304 for the corresponding weekend in 2020.
Melbourne recorded a median price of $1,048,000 for houses sold at auction at the weekend which was higher than the $969,500 recorded over the previous weekend and 13.5% higher than the $923,000 recorded over the same weekend last year.
Data powered by Dr Andrew Wilson of My Housing Market.
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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
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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