Thursday, June 21, 2012

Australia's households vanish

If you use the U.S. experience as a model, households can easily compress down much farther. Two things are temporary: equity and household size. Debt is forever.

Vanishing Households Undercut Claim Of Australian Home Shortage
The Pacific nation had 7.8 million households, data released yesterday from the 2011 Census showed. That compared with estimates of 8.7 million as of June 2010, according to the latest figures used by the National Housing Supply Council, a group created by the government in May 2008 to monitor housing demand, supply and affordability. Australia’s population also grew by 300,000 less than previously estimated, to 21.5 million.
Australia faces a shortage of about 369,000 homes by 2016, under a medium household growth scenario, which assumes the nation will have 9.7 million households by that time, the council said in a report released last week. While home prices across Australia’s eight state capitals fell for a fifth consecutive quarter in the three months through March, the longest stretch of losses on record, the Council has maintained that the gap between supply and underlying demand has widened.


Water usage rates suggest Melbourne is awash with unlisted vacant properties
Soos says the homes his report found are not identified by REIV's rental vacancy rate and says the listing of these homes on the rental market would alleviate rental problems in the city. He says 5.9% of homes he looked at were vacant and says the bulk of these are speculative homes, which rely on capital gains rather than rental incomes.

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