Housing downturn ends (ABS)
Between the March and June quarters of 2020, Australia's capital city property prices fell by 1.8 per cent, driven by Melbourne, but by the third quarter of the year things were on the way up again.
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House prices fell by 2 per cent in the second quarter of 2020, while attached dwellings dropped by about 1 per cent.
The recovery was locked in during the September quarter, however, with all dwelling types recording an increase.
In the September quarter prices rose in Brisbane (+1.5 per cent), Perth (+1.4 per cent), and Sydney (+1.0 per cent), with only Melbourne (-0.3 per cent) of the eight capital cities recording a modest decline.
Over the year Sydney prices are +4.5 per cent higher, and indeed all capital cities saw prices higher than a year earlier with the exception of Darwin (-0.7 per cent), making a mockery of some of the more extreme doomsday predictions.
You can click on the charts to expand them and pick out your capital city.
The mean dwelling price in Australia increased over the year by $20,700 to $689,500, mainly driven by an increase of $25,100 in New South Wales.
Dwelling construction continued throughout 2020, and as such rental markets will remain very weak in Sydney and Melbourne until the international border is reopened.
The value of the dwelling stock increased again to $7.28 trillion, eclipsing the previous highs.
For what it's worth this puts the value of the Australian dwelling stock at approximately 3.78 per cent of GDP.
It's been claimed that this necessarily invokes a systemic correction or crash, but this is not necessarily the case - the ratio was higher in 2017, for one thing, while mortgage rates have declined dramatically since that time.
The dwelling stock to GDP ratio has also been plenty higher than this in recent years in, say, Hong Kong, while dwelling price to income ratios in, for example, China (or any number of global cities) are significantly higher than those of Sydney or Melbourne.
