Articles by Pete Wargent

Let’s have a quick look at dwelling supply, now that the latest population growth estimates are in. 2019 was the biggest ever financial year for apartment completions in Sydney and New South Wales, so the rental market is likely to remain soft for quite some time as the new stock is absorbed.   In Victoria,…

Is this what you call Capital Punishment? The NSW Department of Planning has revised up its population projections, though not for everywhere, with Sydney attracting a greater headcount at the expense of the state’s regions. The population of the harbour city is now expected to rise to beyond 7.1 million by 2041, which is notably…

You’ve heard of the income recession. You’ve heard of the per capita recession. Well, now we have..the private demand recession! Of course, none of these are actually recessions in the traditional sense of the term. And in fact the economy has notched up a record 113 quarters without a technical recession, which is approaching 30…

Mortgage arrears fell sharply to 1.36 per cent in a seasonal improvement to September 2019 as tax cuts and interest rate cuts flowed through, according to S&P Global. There are some residual longer terms arrears, especially in Western Australia as more lenient foreclosure policies have been applied, but 30 day arrears are now back down…

Recently I wrote a short but cautionary blog post about a spike in construction insolvencies, which garnered more than 7,000 blog hits, has so far been viewed more than 3,650 times on LinkedIn, gathered me about 100 new Twitter followers, and was gleefully reposted across Reddit, PropertyChat, and goodness knows where else. This always happens,…

Wage price growth was just +0.5 per cent in the September 2019 quarter, and a rather desperate +2.2 for the year, which represents a disappointing (if not exactly surprising) deceleration. Year-on-year wage price growth was dragged along by public sector wages growth of +2.5 per cent. But quarterly wage price growth in the private sector…

There was election talk of reducing the permanent visa program into Australia, but in truth this has been more than offset by a surge in temporary visa issuance to a total of almost 2.2 million (up from just 1.6 million in 2012). A closer look at the 2019-20 Budget assumptions shows that net overseas migration…

GDP growth in the economy was just 1.4 per cent over FY2019. After accounting for estimated population growth, there was a negative result for GDP per capita at -0.2 per cent. So while we might not technically be in recession, conditions have clearly been weak. The latest central bank forecasts don’t see a recession -…

Two of the stronger leading indicators of economic activity are money growth and building approvals. Building approvals are now down 29 per cent year-in-year, and looking at the latest credit growth figures isn’t going to inspire too much confidence either! Housing credit growth was just 0.2 per cent in August as low transaction volumes and…

Australia’s estimated population growth ostensibly ‘slowed’ to +119,000 in the first quarter of 2019, apparently bringing the annual pace down to +389,000. However, upon closer inspection this was partly due to further processing delays for births in Victoria, which accordingly reduced estimates of the natural population increase. For all the noises about slowing permanent migration…