Australia's Housing Shortage: Is it just an urban myth?

I have been accepting as "fact" for 8 years that Australia has a housing shortage. But what if that was not the case. Would you still buy a home? Is that the question?
Investment Banker Mortgage Stanley recently released research that pointed to Australia actually having a glut of housing, rather than the much touted housing shortage we have all heard about that keeps growing like an evil magic pudding.
Admittedly, I have heard about this housing shortage since 2003 and wondered where all the tent cities were being erected in Australia to justify these claims.
Maybe we will see fake one's sprouting up all over Australia soon?

Housing Shortage, Fact or Myth:Australia goes from an estimated 228,000 housing shortfall to a 341,000 home glut in the time it takes to produce a report!

So how did we get this 569,000 housing turnaround in weeks?

There has to be a reason that house prices have not collapsed in the wake of the GFC.

The estimated 228,000-home shortfall, cited by everyone from the construction industry to economists at the major banks as evidence for why prices remain so high, may, in fact, be an excess of 341,000 homes, according to Morgan Stanley.

Whether the new figures are accurate will only become clear in time, as house prices either level off because real estate is scarce, or prices fall and attract more scrutiny about the fundamentals of the market.
But what if there are other reasons why home prices are staying high in the gloom. Here's a few.

1. Real estate is worth what someone else will pay you for it. People have not been willing to pay what many buyers want, but...
2. Real estate is also worth what you are prepared to let it go for if you are selling. When people have not been able to sell at the price they want or even need, they are hanging on to it.
3. If you have a job you can afford the mortgage till things come good. In Australia's case the job market never went bad, so people can hang onto property for longer.
4. If you hang onto to the old property, then real estate agents are not going to be happy, because you don't effect your sale, and you therefore can't buy the next home. This is exactly what is happening.
5. People are now hanging on to their homes longer and their mortgages longer.
6. From a generational point of view, people are living longer and staying in their homes for longer. And the Government assists this with carers and other services to help people stay out of nursing homes longer.

But the all-important nature of house price movements underscores a bigger issue: we simply don't know what impact elevated property prices have on other aspects of the economy because we don't have a long history of clean, robust and comparable data to rely on.
But I will give it a try here.

1. When you pay too much for a home, you have to hang onto it for longer or risk going underwater.
2. When you pay too much, your mortgage is bigger than it should be. That makes banks happy and rich and that means that you pay more of your income in mortgage repayments than you should be, for the next 30 years. That causes a thing called mortgage stress. As these things have happened then we can say people have paid too much for their homes in the recent past.
3. Are they still paying too much? That will be clear in 2 years time. If prices go down, then yes they are still paying too much today.

In Australia, there is no clear, undisputed authority of information in this area crucial to the economy.

In the US, the S and P Case-Schiller index, which measures changes in prices of the same properties over time, and that is only 25 years old. So where do investment gurus pull 100 year figures from?
The problem I have with any long range figures is that they only rate the homes that are still standing,and over 100 years maybe more than half the housing stock may be demolished. SO counting just the best ones that are left is a hardly a way to determine the appreciation of housing generally. Its taking a generalisation and making it specific. But what about the home that was bought, and later demolished. Surely its worthless. When these homes are included in the overall picture, actual returns are lower.

In Australia, Residex's repeat sales index goes back to 1991, in the middle of a Sydney house price correction on 17% pa interest rates just before the two-decade run-up in house prices began.

One thing for certain is that it is unwise to expect the "boom conditions" to persist indefinitely. That is a interesting term. I thought the boom finished in 2003 and we got ripples in 2006, and last hurrah in 2010?

In 2010, Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens appeared on breakfast TV to warn viewers it was a mistake to ''assume a riskless, easy, and guaranteed way to prosperity is just to leverage property''.
That advise I was giving out from 2005, but nobody wanted to listen back then. That's why home prices went too high. Are they still too high. Well RBA Governor Stevens says no, they are not.

Source; Mr Mortgage

Hot property areas as housing market heats up with mortgage business surge ahead of the election.

Melbourne and Canberra were the hot property standout performers in a mixed bag of capital city housing price increase results for the June quarter while home unit and apartment prices are improving nationwide.
Melbourne house prices jumped 6.5 per cent to a median of $398,217, the strongest growth in six years, according to researcher Australian Property Monitors.
But it was a different story in other capitals.
Prices in Hobart falling 1.6 per cent and Perth's housing bubble deflating at a rate of 0.2 per cent.
Sydney inched along with growth of 1.1 per cent, though apartments turned in a better result with prices rising 2.2 per cent.
"Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane property markets are booming," APM general manager Michael McNamara said.
Prime property is hot
The growth is being driven by the premium end of the market while many outer suburban areas suffer, particularly in Sydney.
Canberra recorded the best growth of all, with 7.4 per cent for the quarter and a surge of 17.6 per cent over the year, taking the median price to $319,587, according to APM.
In Brisbane, prices jumped four per cent for the quarter, or 12.8per cent for the year.
In Melbourne's inner urban area, which includes suburbs such as Malvern, Port Melbourne and St Kilda, prices grew 10.7 per cent for the quarter.
Prahran recorded a massive 22 per cent jump based on 63 sales, Mr McNamara said.
Inner-city heats up
Melbourne's inner south market was also on the boil, with 11.5 per cent growth in house prices, for the quarter.
"It's difficult to see that this heat will be as sustained as in the first three years of this decade," Mr McNamara said.
"It's more likely a six to 12-months phenomenon," he said.
"Low stock levels mean that more cashed-up buyers are competing fiercely for a smaller pool of available properties on the market.
"First-home buyers are also competing with investors trying to take advantage of increasing gross rental yields."
Clearance rates improving
JP Morgan chief economist Stephen Walters said auction clearance rates - about 80 per cent in the past few weekends - pointed to better fortunes in Melbourne.
Mr Walters said investors were likely to be a major factor in the price growth with Melbourne's median price still about $100,000 lower than Sydney.
Adrian Fini, executive director, development, for Mirvac Group, one of Australia's largest apartment developers, said Melbourne residential prices and turnover had been recovering throughout the first half of this year.
While the Sydney market, apart from the strong top end, had been flat, the beginnings of a turnaround were expected later this year, Mr Fini said.Source: The Australian