First-home buyers to benefit from flat housing market

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Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon

Interest rate cuts could help to speed up the sluggish housing market, but new lending rules will likely make it a slow and steady turnaround, an expert says.

CoreLogic’s market report for June shows sales are down 22.1 percent from the same time last year – the first fall in 14 months – while stock is up 20 percent.

House prices are weak, and buyer confidence has evaporated with job security falling and mortgage rates still high, despite small changes from ANZ and Westpac.

Chief property economist Kelvin Davidson said the market would pick up if rates dropped.

“Ordinarily, when mortgage rates fall, you anticipate a boost in the housing market and and we may well see that again. But this time debt to income ratios are different and they will actually start to become more binding as mortgage rates fall and limit how much debt people can get in, therefore limiting house price growth.

“So I think really a 12- or 18-month horizon does look a bit softer for the housing market than perhaps we might have expected in the past.”

However, Davidson said a flatter market was not necessarily a bad thing.

He said it allowed for incomes to catch up, housing affordability to be restored and for more people to get a foot on the ladder, including first-home buyers.

House prices edged up 1.8 percent in the 12 months to June.

In the three months to June, Dunedin (1.5 percent) and Hamilton (0.8 percent) were the strongest performing main centres, while Auckland’s prices fell 2.6 percent.

Davidson said first-home buyers were utilising those lower prices, more stock and less competition to firmly hold a 26 percent share of the market.

He said if banks continued to lower rates it would benefit all buyers, but even if that brought more investors back into the market, the outlook for first- home buyers was positive.

“First-home buyers also have support from the low deposit lending allowances from banks, can access KiwiSaver for at least part of that deposit, even though first home grants are gone, there are other supports in place, first home loans for example, which can allow people with low equity.

“I’m reasonably optimistic about first-home buyers and if the government can be successful in the supply changes, well that will help, and also quite the market just in general over the next two or three years would help.”

Davidson said it was never easy to get a foot on the property ladder, but the current conditions would help.