Shaky property markets across much of the world pose another risk to the global economy as higher interest rates erode household finances and threaten to exacerbate falling prices.
Reports last week have shown the US housing slump stretched into a fifth month, China’s home sales slide continued, and price declines persisted in Australia and New Zealand. In Britain, prices are now in their worst losing streak since 2008.
Sliding home values threaten to undermine consumer confidence and weigh on household spending, which had been a rare bright spot for the global economy last year. Investment too could take a hit as developers scale back projects in response to falling prices, waning demand and higher borrowing costs.
In the past three housing busts, inflation-adjusted house prices have retraced about half of their previous gains, according to Oxford Economics. Prices have risen about 40 per cent around the world since 2012 and the consultancy said in an October report that in a worst-case scenario, housing market weakness could knock global economic growth to around zero this year.
In the US, last year’s run-up in mortgage rates cast a chill on the housing market, leading to the worst annual drop in sales of previously owned homes in more than a decade.
That strain is set to continue during the US Federal Reserve’s campaign to tackle inflation.
Policymakers raised rates by a quarter percentage point at the conclusion of a two-day gathering last week, to a range of 4.5 per cent to 4.75 per cent.
China’s new-home sales tumbled 32.5 per cent in January from a year earlier, preliminary data from China Real Estate Information showed.
The prospect of ongoing weakness in China’s property market is a potential headwind to Nomura’s otherwise upgraded view of this year’s growth prospects, economists led by Ting Lu wrote in a January 31 note. They cited the official narrative that “housing is for living and not for speculating” and declining prices as brakes on speculative demand.
In Britain, Nationwide Building Society said the average home value has fallen for five months in a row. A jump in mortgage rates and the tightest cost-of-living crisis in a generation is squeezing the spending power of home buyers, putting the cost of property out of reach to more people.
“The overall affordability situation looks set to remain challenging in the near term,” said Robert Gardner, Nationwide’s chief economist.
The average two-year fixed-rate home loan jumped to a 14-year high of 6.65 per cent in October. Mortgage rates have come down from their peak to well below 6 per cent, but home buyers and households renewing their deals are still facing painfully high monthly repayments.
Prices continued to fall in Australia and New Zealand last month, with the slide likely to continue as neither property market has yet felt the full brunt of last year’s spike in interest rates.
Many New Zealand households are on fixed-rate mortgages that have yet to roll over to a new, higher rate. As a consequence, economists are predicting house prices will fall further and will be at least 20 per cent below their late-2021 peak by early 2024.
In capital city Wellington, prices have already fallen 18.1 per cent from a year earlier, CoreLogic data show. In the largest city, Auckland, prices are down 8.2 per cent.
It’s a similar story in Australia, where a spike in loan repayments for those whose mortgages switch to higher variable rates this year is set to weigh on consumption, according to a report by Bloomberg Intelligence.
Repayments on 15 per cent of home loans could jump by more than 80 per cent when their ultra-low fixed rate expires, analysts Mohsen Crofts and Jack Baxter said in the report. They estimate the hit to household income will be the equivalent of 2.2 percentage points of retail sales.
One bright sign is coming from Hong Kong, which is seeing glimpses of a housing recovery as the border with mainland China reopens. New-home sales in the city may surge more than 50 per cent this year, buoyed by pent-up demand from mainland buyers, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
