Australian property up 222% in 15 years

04/08/2010

New numbers from the Bank of International Settlements may fuel concerns that the Australian housing market is overheated. They show that since 1996, prices for existing Australian capital city dwellings are up 222 per cent. That rise is larger than for almost any other developed nation.

Australia is also one of the few countries to record substantial rises over the past three years – 29 per cent in the three years to March 2010. The Economist magazine ranks Australia’s market as “the most overvalued of any of the 20 countries we track”. Others, like Rismark’s Christopher Joye, set more store by the relationship between housing prices and incomes, which has remained stable since 2004 after surging in the early years of the decade.

The Reserve Bank of Australia has explained recent home price rises partly as the natural result of increasing the population while constraining the housing industry’s ability to build.

Source: Banking Day