Australia's housing market would crash if these factors aligned

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

An Australian property market crash may be laughable, but it's conceivable.
Housing is politically sensitive because access to it influences our lives enormously.
The Albanese government is attempting to ramp-up housing supply, and is offering shared equity schemes to make housing more affordable.
"That's part of the issue is politically it is very difficult to introduce [new] big bang policies that may actually have some sort of impact on house prices because a lot of people are going lose out," Ben Phillips, an associate professor from ANU's Centre for Social Policy Research, says.
A property price crash, of course, would make many millions of homes more affordable.
But is that realistic, or even possible?
Australian property prices have faced three major speed bumps over the past four decades.
The share market crashed in October 1987, leading to an economic downturn, which saw the unemployment rate rise to 10.8 per cent.
It hurt asset prices including property.
Australia's two largest cities saw the biggest falls, with house prices falling 10 per cent in Melbourne, and roughly 9 per cent in Sydney between 1989 and 1991.
In the global financial crisis of 2008, Australia's median property price fell by around 8.5 per cent over an 11-month period, according to CoreLogic.
The COVID-19 pandemic, decades later, saw the unemployment rate reach 7.4 per cent in July 2020.
Phillips says that "didn't really have much impact".
What would likely lead to a property market correction, and potentially a crash, analysts say, is a spike in Australia's unemployment rate.
The latest official data from the US shows a shock slowdown in American bosses hiring new candidates. A spike in the unemployment rate here in Australian is not inconceivable.
"I think you'd need to have some sort of an event — and I don't quite know what that would be — that would lead to a lot of people losing their jobs, who are professionals and who own houses," Phillips says.
Independent economist Saul Eslake has a clearer picture of what that "event" would look like.
"So if, for example, Australia were to be hit by some external shock emanating, for example, from the United States or China, that prompted unemployment to rise significantly," Eslake says.
Cotality's head of research, Eliza Owen, agrees.
"So the unemployment rate is probably the thing that's holding [the property market] together," Owen says.
"If we saw a big blowout in the unemployment rate, that's when mortgage serviceability becomes less stable, less certain.
"You might have more forced sales and that would add to supply and contribute to a blowout in falling home values."
While not putting any numbers around what would cause an Australian property market crash she says: "It would have to be a combination of demand shock and a large increase in unemployment."
"So that probably comes from a severe economic downturn."
Eslake adds that a combination of interest rate hikes and a severe cut to the migration intake would be necessary for a "demand shock" to the property market.
The bottom line is that any economic or financial event would need to be deep and long-lasting, economists say, to produce a property market correction or crash.
But Phillips notes that many home owners are well ahead in their mortgage repayments and have managed their finances to help ride out a financial storm.
"Most people in Australia are pretty wealthy and if you're a home owner, and those are most of the people who are buying and selling houses are actually home owners — they have large amounts of equity, they've got large redraw facilities to survive during any sort of challenging financial times," he says.
Phillips says this, and a chronic shortage of housing, has made Australia's housing market virtually indestructible.
"And I think particularly through an environment where you've got quite low interest rates and you've got effectively a fairly fixed level of housing supply and certainly in the short term, that's probably why it's then house prices stay as strong as they have or increase increased quite strongly."
Eslake argues the government and the Reserve Bank stand at the ready to respond to any economic event which poses a threat to financial markets.
"I think the Reserve Bank would cut interest rates significantly," he says.
In addition, he argues, the big four banks, in the event of a big endogenous economic shock, would fall over themselves to help mortgage borrowers avoid foreclosure.
"Most banks will, if a mortgage customer loses his or her job, comes forward quickly enough and the bank's persuaded that there's a reasonable prospect that that person will find a job in the next six months, [the bank will] go to considerable lengths to help those customers," Eslake says.
"The banks certainly don't like to have mortgagee and possession signs going up in front of their customers houses."
So, is a property market crash possible? Of course. Is a correction more realistic? Yes.
But you would need some combination of a drastic cut to migration, interest rate hikes, and a significant and long-term jump in white-collar unemployment with little government support.
It's a tall order.