Every day, more analysts are calling a top to Australia’s property price boom and predicting price falls out to 2017.
Macquarie Research calculates a 7.5 per cent fall from 2016 to mid-2017 after peaking next year. Bank of America Merrill Lynch says prices could fall 6 per cent through 2017. And now AMP Capital predicts house prices will fall 5 to 10 per cent in 2017.
This would clearly hurt banks, retailers, property trusts and residential building construction companies, and presents a risk of broader economic recession for the first time in decades.
One of the biggest losers in any property downturn would be the government.
The Australian tax system raises 9 per cent of its total tax revenue from property, compared to an OECD average of 5 per cent, making property owners Australia's largest collective taxpayer. No other asset class is subject to such a high level of taxation.
Homeowners contributed some $40 billion in real estate specific taxes in the 2013-14 financial year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and research by the Property Council of Australia puts the industry’s tax bill at $72.1bn if you include company tax, GST and capital gains paid by property owners.
Stamp duty alone contributes more than a fifth of the total revenues of the NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and Northern Territory governments.
While paying lip service to concerns over escalating property prices and stockmarkets and the threat from bubbles, world policymakers have been knowingly inflating the value of assets for years, doing anything it takes to keep short-term economic momentum going forward rather than backward.
A byproduct of these record low interest rates and the boom in lending against residential property has been a tremendous jump in property-related government revenue.
For state governments, taxes on property were the largest source of revenue in 2013–14, making up 38 per cent of the total. At over $26bn, property-related state tax revenue was up 19 per cent from a year earlier.
Source: ABS
The booming housing market has been a windfall for the NSW government in particular, helping it revise its budget surplus to $2.1bn and forecast stamp duty revenue of $7.8bn in 2015-16.
Sydney’s northern beaches buyers alone spent $2.8bn on houses and $1.4bn on units, contributing about $230m in stamp duty in the year to June, according to analysis by Manly Daily.
Stamp duties now account for more than 28 per cent of the NSW government's tax revenues after two years of double-digit price growth. Sydney’s median house price of $785,000 equates to over $30,000 in stamp duty.
In its submission to the federal government's tax white paper reform process, the Property Council of Australia says that in 2013-14, the property industry directly contributed $182.5bn to Australia’s GDP (or one ninth of economic output) and directly employed 1.17 million full-time equivalent employees, almost 12 per cent of the Australian workforce.
The cost of stamp duty over the life of an average mortgage is now $61,542 in Sydney, $56,616 in Melbourne, $49,701 in Darwin and $35,427 in Canberra, the Property Council's modelling showed.
Clearly the economy and government are significantly exposed to the fortunes of the property market and any downward swing in housing turnover will badly hurt government budgets, and support urges for an increase in the GST to compensate.
This housing dominance means prudent investors should hedge their bets and take some alternative exposure rather than keeping their eggs all in one basket, says Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital.
“I am not in the property crash camp, but the risk of it does reinforce our assessment that Australian investors should have a decent exposure to say unhedged global shares because it could provide an offset should something go wrong with Australian housing,” Oliver says.