There is strong belief among Australians that housing market will not crash because majority people will not be willing or forced to sell for reduced price. Although it is true that majority of people will not sell at low price, there is misconception how many forced or willing sellers is necessary to crash the market.
Let's see behaviour of market stock in Australia over the past 5 years or so:
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| Chart1 Stock on the market RPdata |
From the chart, we can see that number of homes for sale doubled since first housing troubles started in 2008. Stock slightly decreased during short boom in late 2009 - early 2010 but increased 50% since then. Similar data comes from SQM - Chart 2
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| Chart2 - Stock on the market SQM |
From observation of a recent events in USA, I noticed that significant rise in inventories is not needed for price to crash. If we take a look at US existing house inventories (Chart 3) we can clearly see that inventories didn't increased more than inventories in Australia.
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| Char3 - US existing home inventory |
From the chart we can see that home inventories in USA at the peak were lower than current inventory in Australia. At the peak inventories were only about 4% of total housing stock, while that percentage already passes 4.5% in Australia. It is hard to say that 4% of the total stock is extreme number that caused 33% price crash in USA. We should also notice that stock on the market fell in late 2008 early 2009 when house prices dropped the most. This means there is something else that significantly affects house prices.
Lets take a look at sales:
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| Chart4 - US home sales |
It is clear that drop in sales, significantly affected housing market in USA. Lack of buyers seems to have much larger effect on price than rise in inventories. It is expected there will always be significant number of people forced or willing (for any reason) to sell, but it's hard to expect significant number of buyers (especially if credit freezes and/or unemployment hits).
Let's see whether this holds in Australia
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| Chart 5 - Australia home sales |
It is clear that house price fall in 2008/2009 was caused by significant fall in sales. House prices recovered driven by new buyers although stock on market remained elevated compared to pre 2007 levels.
It looks like inventory levels at the moment are more than enough to enable market crash, it's up to buyers to set market direction. Recent drop in sales (since 2010) is larger than drop recorded in USA during the first two years of price contraction. If soon buyers do not return to the market in large numbers, we may expect price fall to accelerate. There is no need for mass panic sale for prices to fall significantly.
