SOME LIGHT AMID THE GLOOM

THERE were three – pretty small – shards of good news in the latest figures for housing finance.

First and most encouragingly, the number of owneroccupiers getting a loan increased. The increase wasn’t huge – just 2.2 per cent in the month of October. But it was only the third time this year that the number’s gone up – every other month it’s been down.

The combination of investors withdrawing from the market – or being driven out by reluctant lender banks – and (slightly) more affordable houses has at last given owner-occupiers a fairer suck on the sauce bottle, as a former PM once put it.

Within that, even more encouragingly, the number of first-time owneroccupiers was up.

Sure, they still only comprised a small minority of all owner-occupier buyers – just 18.1 per cent – but that’s always the case. Most of the loans are usually taken by people trading up or simply just moving to a new house.

But I think it was great to see the number of buyers getting into their first home kicking up from 8764 across Australia in September to 10,137 in October.

Again, you gotta believe that was a direct result of houses, especially in Melbourne and Sydney, becoming – to repeat, slightly – more affordable.

It’s a lot, lot harder to buy that first home, as opposed to cashing in a big – tax-free – increase in value and moving on to your second or third or whatever home.

The third bit of good news – you might think, somewhat counter to my above comments – was a small rise in investor loans, after sliding for most of the year.

That points to the market maybe bottoming out; to banks being slightly less panicked about lending to investors; and so some broader good news on the construction sector and the economy more broadly in among all that negative news of the past week or so.

As we enter 2019 let’s hope we can get a series of better ‘balances’ in property. Between investors and owner-occupiers. Between first-home buyers and owners trading up. Between buyers and sellers. Between construction of new houses and apartments and ‘second-hand’ properties.