old news and what a load of sensationalist rubbish..
"And just as these intrepid ursine backpackers are limbering up, the SMH apparently joined in yesterday with the phrase “buyers flee” in a headline. It’s a fine, picturesque word “flee”, especially when coupled with “droves”. It conjures up images like this (people fleeing tanks) or this (people fleeing the tsunami).
I got an email yesterday from an alarmed Sydney friend who said he had been reading about the “seeming desertion of house buyers at auction” and was wondering what’s going on.
Well, the story was about a fall in home loans, not auctions. Clearance rates actually went up last week, from 70.7 to 73 per cent in Sydney and an amazing 75.5 to 85 per cent in Melbourne. According to Australian Property Monitors, there were 515 successful auctions in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide for a total of $400 million.
So I don’t know about fleeing buyers, but loan approvals are definitely down. According to the ABS, the number of owner-occupier loans fell 1.8 per cent in February, the seventh fall in eight months.......
Anyway, a plateau this year would hardly be surprising; in fact another 12 per cent rise in the national median house price in 2010 would be staggering, and would see the RBA cash rate closer to 6 per cent than 5 per cent by early 2011.
Will Steve Keen’s 40 per cent crash finally arrive, two years after America’s? Not with unemployment at 5.3 per cent and the national income about to rise 3 per cent because of the resources boom."
