Unit indigestion
The construction pipeline is now shrinking fast, but there's been a blast of off-the-plan completions in Sydney over recent months that kept the city's vacancy rate up at a lofty 3.4 per cent in April 2019.
That's lower than the 3.6 per cent seen in the December Christmas period, but well up from 2.3 per cent a year earlier, for a year-on-year increase of about 6,000 vacancies across the city.
Vacancy rates have run high in parts of Western Sydney, the Sutherland Shire, Parramatta, and in the Hills Shire, from Norwest to North Rocks and beyond.
Another hotspot for completions has been along the busy Pacific Highway from North Sydney to Crows Nest.
Often these are hardly desirable dwellings on a busy strip - many have a single bedroom and no parking - but the volume of new supply has still put plenty of pressure on rentals in the lower north shore for units that aren't well presented.
New investment loans have been crunched by sometimes impossibly tight lending standards, but in Sydney the market has yet to absorb the new supply previously bought off the plan.
The number of units under construction in New South Wales peaked all the way back in December 2017 and has been falling ever since, but this has been a record cycle for the construction of generic units.
Brisbane went through a similar glut of high-rise apartments, but vacancy rates have now been trending lower over approximately 13 months.
On the mortgage lending environment, I'd blithely assumed some sanity on the scrutiny of expenses might return in 2019.
But from various anecdotes over the past week perhaps things have gotten even more over-scrupulous, with payments of even a few dollars being questioned on occasion, for reasons that are beyond my ken.
