Rental trends
Interesting rental vacancy rate figures from SQM Research.
Brisbane's vacancy rate is now tightening along with the rest, and this is bullish for the Queensland capital's burgeoning housing market.
In fact Brisbane's rental vacancy rate is the lowest since all the way back in 2012, and is becoming decidedly tight away from the CBD.
In Melbourne, where normally you'd expect to see vacancy rates declining in the month of February, there was another increase.
As noted elsewhere, Melbourne is still delivering a relatively high number of city and city-fringe rental units, at a time when nobody really wants to live in them.
If you live in Sydney you'd know this already from the traffic queue pain, but life is quickly returning to normal there.
The Sydney CBD vacancy rate continues to decline, according to SQM Research.
The death of the CBD might hold true in some parts of the world, but not so in Sydney - unlike elsewhere, Sydney CBD and its immediate surrounds are superb places to live and work (I've even lived on Pitt St. in my earlier years, and it's great...as long as you have a quiet apartment).
Overall, the national vacancy rate was steady at 2 per cent in February, the same as a year earlier.
That equates to approximately 71,000 rental vacancies, but 28,000 of them are in one city - Melbourne - largely relating to units around the CBD.
Around the country, says SQM, it's a landlord's market.
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Weekly payrolls return to their pre-pandemic levels in February, and housing prices rebounded by +3 per cent., having slumped in 2020.
The Reserve Bank hosed down any expectations of any end to the yield control target in its latest Minutes.
More detail from the data wizard James Foster here.
