澳洲房价加速下跌：悉尼墨尔本领跌，投资者借贷能力骤降

Welcome to the Bloomberg Australia podcast. I'm Chris Burke. House prices are falling at the fastest rate since 2022. Auction clearance rates are tumbling and it's just become a bit tougher to be a property investor. While that could be welcome news for first home buyers, it's also making millions of Australians feel poorer. So, what does that mean for the economy? inflation and interest rates. Joining me this week to discuss all that is James McIntyre, Bloomberg's economist for Australia and New Zealand.

James, welcome back to the podcast.

Thank you very much, Chris. So, James, uh, house prices, uh, our favorite subject, uh, as you know. Um, new data out this week from Kotality shows that Australia's housing downturn is deepening with national prices posting the biggest monthly fall since December 2022. Look, over the June quarter, uh, the data shows that Sydney prices fell 3.2% and Melbourne was down 2.6. It's not an even picture, though, is it? How are things playing out in the rest of the country?

Yeah, look, it's it's not an even picture, but some of the picture has been evening out. So, over the last couple of months, we've been starting to notice that things weren't that great. Uh especially in the top end, the top 25% of the Sydney and Melbourne markets. They've been they've been declining since late last year. But the the pain has gathered momentum and it's spread. And so what we've been seeing uh over the course of uh this latest month uh the month of June is that uh Adelaide's market has grown to a halt.

Uh and the gains in uh these these smaller capital cities had Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane had been posting very strong gains while things had been uh treading water or going backwards in Sydney and Melbourne. But that the the gains have now really really slowed down. It's I think it would be um not a surprise to see if we were to have this discussion in a month's time in July uh to be seeing Brisbane either uh flatlining or potentially falling uh as as well.

So we've had a big big turn uh in terms of how the momentum within the housing market over the last four to 6 weeks uh really and um and not a turn for the best.

Let's just take a bit of a dive into why this is happening. Obviously, we've had three backto back backto-back rate hikes this year. Uh that was before the RBA hit the pause button last month. Look, is that the main factor driving this downturn or are there some other other dynamics at play here?

Yeah, I think there's there's a couple of dynamics at play. It's not just uh the RBA and it's also not just the changes that the federal government announced in their budget in May around investor taxation arrangements. We had as I seen this this whole thing started off in November last year and that's that's before uh the conflict uh erupted with Iran. Affordability has been challenged for Sydney and Melbourne and then as rate hikes were delivered uh unexpectedly if we were to have this discussion 6 or 12 months ago.

Uh there might have been an expectation that the RBA would either be on hold or easing. Here we are after three rate hikes taking rates back up to 4.35%. that has uh hurt borrowing capacity, poor affordability uh for those buyers that might be out there. And then the changes in the budget uh what they've done is they've really uh pulled investors capacity to borrow back. Uh the no longer the ability to no longer uh cash out uh negative gearing benefits.

You uh instead any losses that you make are are carried forward. previously you were able to cash those out and get a tax return and you and banks would use that uh extra um uh liquidity or extra room in households budgets to increase the amount that investors could borrow. So that's another thing along with the rate hikes uh that has uh that has pulled I guess the capacity of of potential buyers uh to to leverage up uh into the housing market and um and then when we think about that all of the uncertainty that has uh that has hit over the last couple of months as the straight of Hormuz is being closed and what the impacts might be uh of that uh uh real huge surge in geopolitical uncertainty.

All of these things together uh have formed a little bit of a perfect storm and just nudged what was already uh a bit of a sluggishness and that downturn that the top end of the Sydney and Melbourne market has really just tipped it over into a broader decline.

Yeah, those budget changes uh you mentioned have been a massive story. Um and the local press uh there's been a lot of press coverage and a lot of angry people on social media. They've even been partly blamed for for the recent surge in One Nation support um at the expense of Labor. But look um those changes were only passed through parliament last week. Have we actually seen the impact from them on house prices yet or is uh what you're referring to is that more of a more sentiment driven?

Well, there is a sentiment hit for sure and every social media commentator and every property um uh you know uh influencer for one of a better word or influencer uh out there is is uh you know if we look at any of our feeds there is a um uh a long train of people uh calling it you know the the end of of property investment in Australia and that and you know that that noise will last for a little while until everyone finds uh the new uh the new rules of the road and operates on them.

But even though the legislative changes have uh have only recently come through and there are dates uh from uh it's not just the budget night uh that's important for any purchases made uh immediately after that uh but then as we go through the the 1 July and then the one July the following year uh for for where these cut off dates for for various points of the changes are what really matters is for banks uh lending today and making a decision on uh how much a potential investor could borrow uh to to turn up to an auction or if or to make an offer on a property because uh as as we uh as the data shows these auctions are not being very well attended and very well bid uh right now. um what banks are prepared to borrow has taken those uh negative gearing changes into account almost immediately.

And so investors no long have have been uh seeing anywhere between you know 20 to 30% declines in their potential size of their borrowing power uh uh straight away uh from those changes. And banks have to do that from a responsible lending perspective. And so what that means is that uh uh those budget changes especially to negative gearing have already had that impact in the market straight away. And what it's done is it's put almost it's put those investors almost not quite but it's really kind of reign them back to be more of a level pegging on borrowing power and borrowing capacity with first-time buyers and other owner occupiers. you put out some research last week uh which got a fair bit of attention.

You you crunched some numbers from uh Kotality and the Australian Bureau of Statistics to show that the housing slump had wiped 185 billion Aussie dollars from house values in Sydney and Melbourne. Uh that was for the 3 months through June 25. But look, now we have the full data for June this week. Have those numbers been revised at all?

So, look, the June the June 2026 data is has come out and we were using data through the course of the month and and and looking at how that compared to uh the ABS's estimate of the dwelling stock at 31st of March and and we we saw those out, you know, we we kind of did we did a proxy calculation to work out, well, what might the declines in Sydney and Melbourne mean uh if they were replicated across uh New South Wales and Victoria? and it's around about a similar number, but that's where it is to 30 June.

Uh you know, the market is continuing to decline. Uh it's not likely that we're you know, so we will see uh the size of this potential hit uh on on property prices um uh you know, growing over coming months. There has been

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