philip-lowe
Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe (Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)

Tuesday was a special day. It’s not every day we find out house prices rose by $157,000 over the past year. But on Tuesday, when the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released its Residential Property Price Index, the sheer scale of Australian house price growth was made evident. Average capital city dwelling prices rose a whopping 16.8%. That’s not quite cryptocurrency levels of return, but it’s close.

In the pandemic, we have learned a lot about what drives property prices. Old arguments about migration causing property price rises need to be shelved — or at least very much nuanced. Because the single biggest moving part in the past 18 months has been interest rates. Official interest rates fell to basically zero, and mortgage interest rates followed them down. 

As the next graph shows, that lit a fire under house prices in every capital city. Darwin to Hobart, no city has been left behind.

You can borrow a million bucks to buy a home at less than 2% interest. That makes it easy for people to take on staggering mortgages. And Aussies are doing so. Well, some Aussies are. Not all age brackets can afford it. The level of home ownership in Australia for under-40s has been at its lowest point on record.

Should the Reserve Bank (RBA) bear the blame for all this? Not if you ask the RBA. 

On Tuesday, as the new ABS house price data was being released, two RBA officials made themselves available for questioning. First up was assistant governor (economic) Luci Ellis. She was keen to point out changes in the housing people want.

“In the wake of COVID, many households have reconsidered their housing needs,” Ellis said. “Some people have considered whether moving to a regional area or to an outer part of a large city is now more practicable because working from home is more practicable, and because living in high density areas is something they don’t want to take on as a health risk.“

Ellis is not wrong. While every state has seen price rises, not all types of property are equally desirable. As the next graph shows, if you own an inner-city apartment in Melbourne, all this chat about rising property prices might leave you cold. The winning move has been owning regional property.

With apartment blocks in Melbourne regularly being declared as Tier 1 exposure sites, such a shift is understandable. 

What this tells us is that interest rates are an accelerant. Petrol on the fire. They can’t make a property’s price rise if nobody wants that property. You need demand to make prices rise. And the supply and demand dynamics for attached dwellings in the inner city have not been enough to generate big price rises.

The RBA boss was willing to concede the role of low interest rates in rising house prices.

“I know many young people are concerned … it’s true low interest rates are having an effect,” Philip Lowe said in response to a question on Tuesday. “It’s something that as a citizen I would like to see addressed; as a central banker I can’t do anything about it.” 

That’s plainly untrue, but he did go on to explain what he meant. He emphasised low interest rates are in place to help the economy, and raising them to cool the property market would hurt the economy. “This is a poor trade-off,” he said. 

The argument about house prices is not unlike the arguments about bushfire season. Is it the climate of low interest rates or the sparks of demand that causes the infernos of rising prices? The answer is one that requires minds capable of grasping nuance: both.

Low rates make house price surges more likely, but they’re not solely and uniquely to blame. You can’t have a fire without a spark, and you don’t get a house price boom without supply and demand dynamics making it happen.

So long as Australia’s economy is underperforming, with low wages growth and higher-than-desirable unemployment, we will have low interest rates, and that will mean surges in supply and demand for property cause big price changes.

So what will happen next with demand? One scenario is that the borders open back up in 2022 and the international students return just as COVID fears abate. That could cause a strong pull back to the centre, with city prices rising.

Alternatively, supply could become the relevant factor.

“The growth rate of the dwelling stock has for some years run ahead of population growth,” Ellis said on Tuesday. The government’s HomeBuilder program has also led to a supply bump. Could Australians become sated with housing? Perhaps not exactly, but equally, the growth rate of the last year looks extremely hard to maintain.