Tag housing

HIA should advocate inexpensive land

MELBOURNE:- Very poor residential land sales have prompted fresh pleading for the construction industry by the Housing Industry Association today in ‘Land Sales Signal Slow Home Building Recovery’ as new home buyers remain unwilling to commit at current high land…

Telling the RBA like it is

Reprinted from On Line Opinion 6 Sept 2012 The apathy of economists about the costs and burdens imposed upon modest citizens is staggering, as though this is their natural lot and there is nothing to be done. Housing is a…

House prices stagnate

The ABS Eight Capital Cities House Price Indexes 6416.0 released today shows the property market is totally stagnant with prices unmoved, says Prosper Australia. “Property spruikers calling ‘Bottom!’ based on this data – and they will be – are misleading…

Weak Construction gets Weaker

Dwelling construction continues to fall, according to the AIG-HIA Performance of Construction Index for May. Commercial construction and house building activity weakened to 34.7, where anything below 50.0 represents contraction. In parallel, the ABS Building Approvals graph looks like a…

Muck in Marrickville

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald has a breathless article about a flipper couple who bought, renovated and have for sale a Marrickville terrace. The underlying message: there’s profit in the renovation game. My back-of-envelope calculations based on the article’s figures show…

Psst! Stamp duty can be avoided

As the Fairfax papers reported on April 14, the NSW government has rejected yet another recommendation to replace conveyancing stamp duty by a broad-based land tax. That is the effect of the “stamp duty replacement tax” recommended on page 13-4 of…