Property recovery
Capital city dwelling prices rebounded in the December quarter, rising by +3 per cent (to be up by +3.6 per cent over the calendar year), mainly driven by houses more so than attached dwellings.
Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, and Hobart led the way, with all of these markets recording +3 per cent rises or greater over the December quarter, though in fact all capital cities saw significant increases.
The surprise best performing market since the inception of the data series in 2003 has been...Hobart (Sydney was coming to the end of its post-Olympics boom in 2003).
We normally tend to think of 'median' dwelling prices, but average or mean prices did hit a fresh high of $728,500 in the December quarter, driven by the premium end of the housing market.
At 10.6 million dwellings, that values all of the housing stock owned by all sectors at around $7.7 trillion.
The media talk has rapidly about-faced from a likely housing market crash to the need for intervention to slow the Sydney market, though in reality prices were still below 2017 levels in December, and especially so for units and other attached dwellings.
With the government incentivising first homebuyers and the Reserve Bank encouraging the flow of credit via the provision of a term funding facility, the likelihood of an intervention to cool the market in Sydney seems fairly remote at this stage.
