Housing finance bounce, but...
A bounce for housing finance seemed to be on the cards, as all those painfully slow mortgage applications finally grind through the arduous process.
And so it proved, with owner-occupier approvals excluding refinancing up by nearly 5 per cent in October 2018.
I didn't think last month's plunge was too much to get excited about, and the same view applies to this month's bounce.
Yes, a seasonally adjusted $30 billion of housing finance in aggregate is apparently much more solid than $29.3 billion a month earlier.
But smoothing the results on a trend basis simply puts the ABS figures back in line with the credit impulse, and implies modest further declines in housing prices in Sydney and Melbourne into 2019.
Investment housing loans posted a small bounce, but it was still the weakest quarter for investment lending since 2013.
At the state level home loan transactions in Western Australia now look set to rise, as New South Wales and Victoria ease.
The average loan size has been trimmed back a little over the past five months, for both first homebuyers and non-first homebuyers.
The share of first homebuyers rose to a 6-year high at a tick above 18 per cent, first-timers being pulled in by grants and incentives, although tighter credit risks pushing more of them into negative equity, which is not the greatest start in life.
There are still plenty of new homes settling and being financed for now, but apartment pre-sales have dried up, suggesting that this figure is set to continue plunging for a long while to come.
Non-banks have picked up some of the slack, but here too lending volumes have been curtailed of late.
Overall, a much more upbeat release than the preceding month, but one that needs to be seen in the context of recent trends.
