Sydney, Melbourne and Perth housing prices are currently neck and neck in a race to the bottom.
CoreLogic’s monthly figures have revealed that housing prices dived 0.7% around the country in the past four weeks, with a 0.9 per cent drop in the capital cities, ABC reports.
Sydney saw the steepest fall in prices with a 1.4% drop, bringing the cities overall decline to 9.5% over the past financial year.
It’s the biggest fall since the record drop between 1989-1991, a period marked marred by rising unemployment and the threat of recession.
The good news in light of this statistic is that Australia currently has record lows when it comes to interest rates, with unemployment hovering around the 5% mark, and general economic growth occurring.
The Sco Mo express even promised a surplus in the budget that is set to drop next March, so you could say that things are remarkably peachy for 2018 (if you’re holding out for a price drop to buy a house, that is).
In the Sydney region specifically, houses in Parramatta, Sutherland and the Ryde/ Hills/ Hawksberry District saw the greatest decline, with prices dropping by over 10%, according to the report.
The PM’s home suburb of Sutherland is leading the downward trend in Sydney
Inner-east Melbourne was down by nearly 12%, and inner-south fell by over 9%.
“It does look like the rate of decline is starting to gather a little bit of momentum now, particularly as we start to see owner-occupiers becoming less active in the market” CoreLogic head Tim Lawless told the ABC.
“Our view is that values will continue to trend lower through 2019…Sydney, considering values are already down 9.5 per cent from their peak, we could see a decline of around 15% in that market.”
“We would expect that values in Melbourne would probably decline by at least 10 per cent as well” added Mr Lawless, adding that rental prices were forecast to grow at a significantly slower rate than in the past.”
“That’s really reflective of the fact that there has been a lot of new supply coming onto rental markets,” he said.
In other news, shares in smashed avo stocks soared in Sydney and Melbourne this morning. More to come on that later….
