Tim L from CoreLogic is one of the genuine nice guys of the industry - a straight-shooter and a fine analyst to boot.
In fact, it was a conversation with Tim at Devils and Details Live at Sydney's Ivy last year that finally convinced me to move to Noosa (thanks Tim!).
Onwards...
As Tim quite rightly notes, there's been a strong rebound in housing sentiment, supported by his charting analysis below.
There's also, however, been tremendous hyperbole concerning this week's housing finance figures in the media.
In reality, there was only modest evidence of any increased borrowing capacity in the numbers.
The rebound was predominantly driven by an increased volume of homebuyers coming back into the market, and total lending is only back to where it was a handful of months ago (when 60 Minutes and others were still banging on about 'a crash like Ireland', btw).
Housing market turnover is coming off near-record lows, so more people buying homes to live in and furnish - especially first homebuyers - is unequivocally a good thing, not a bad thing.
In saying that, the trend does look quite positive, especially for homebuyers.
Lending to investors was slightly off the lows, having been absolutely annihilated more than 50 per cent lower (ex-refinancing) since peaking in 2015.
The fact is, housing credit has been tracking at record lows, at about 3 per cent.
And as such the latest RBA Chart Packs suggested that the household debt to disposable income ratio may be marginally lower by the September 2019 quarter, at ~1.88x household disposable income (not 200 per cent of income as regularly reported).
And as such the latest RBA Chart Packs suggested that the household debt to disposable income ratio may be marginally lower by the September 2019 quarter, at ~1.88x household disposable income (not 200 per cent of income as regularly reported).
There's also the small matter of mortgage prepayments, with the average home loan having been 2½ years ahead of schedule repayments for a few years now.
If we actually could crack on and focus on getting wages growth back to above 3 per cent, or ideally higher, this would obviously help to reduce the ratio!
Once the outdated figures catch up, recent significant declines in mortgage rates will soon see household interest payments declining towards about 8 per cent of disposable income, from well above 13 per cent in 2008 (apparently this constitutes 'near its peak', whereas the data in H2 2019 will show nothing of the sort).
Plenty of commentary is jumping at shadows after one month of rebound in the housing data, and is focused on the fundamentally flawed assumption that monetary policy should be calibrated to target the 'right' level of house prices or credit growth.
No wonder inflation expectations continue to flounder: households know tight policy when they see it, while the successive years below target having seen credibility take a knock.
NAB's leading (or least lagging) indicator business surveys today suggested nothing much different from a continuation of the 'per capita recession', and effectively a low likelihood of unemployment falling towards 4 per cent.
Source: NAB
Finally, it's also interesting to note that housing price indices - which were until recently often treated with disdain - are now routinely assumed to be accurate to a decimal place on a 24-hourly basis!
Of course, even the most sophisticated index cannot be so, for there are far too many moving parts to any housing market, let alone one where stock turnover has been so low.
Of course, even the most sophisticated index cannot be so, for there are far too many moving parts to any housing market, let alone one where stock turnover has been so low.
