Building boom
There's been some interesting discussion about Australia's housing 'oversupply' on the socials.
There are, of course, several different was in which you might interpret the term.
In terms of the number of physical dwellings, the dwelling stock increased by 1.6 per cent over the year to March 2021, and this is likely to pick up towards 2 per cent over the remainder of 2021.
This comes at a time when annual population growth in Australia has slowed to just 136,000 or 0.5 per cent, due to border closures.
The boom in construction of detached houses has overall been more than outweighed by the shift away from share houses and high-rise tower blocks, however.
Rental vacancies are approaching all-time lows (despite the high vacancy rates in e.g. Melbourne CBD, where the rental vacancy rate is 8 per cent).
Meanwhile lower mortgage rates have seen demand pick up strongly, to the extent that total stock listings are some 27 per cent lower than the 5-year average.
